[HN Gopher] The Crime of Curiosity
___________________________________________________________________
The Crime of Curiosity
Author : prostoalex
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-09-15 16:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.piratewires.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.piratewires.com)
| donmcronald wrote:
| > I'm hesitant to say it worked because vaccines are complicated
| and we'd need further testing to confirm our results.
|
| That's the line that makes me interested enough to read more and
| think about what the author is saying. Misinformation doesn't
| typically come with a disclaimer saying it might be wrong, so
| that tells me the author isn't being intentionally deceiving or
| spreading information where they have no clue what's happening.
|
| Reading more, it actually piques my curiosity a bit. It reminds
| me of board level electronics repair before I saw Louis
| Rossmann's YouTube channel. I always thought it was impossible,
| but then you watch one video of him doing it and realize all the
| rhetoric about it being difficult, impossible, and dangerous is
| just that; rhetoric.
|
| I don't know what the answer is in terms of dealing with
| misinformation, but one thing I believe fairly strongly is that
| letting large, private institutions decide what's fact and what's
| fiction is problematic. The "facts" will _always_ align with
| their business interests.
|
| I'd even say it's risky to let big companies like manufacturers
| get away with their lies. I _KNOW_ electronic and appliance
| manufacturers are lying about the complexity of their products
| because I can watch a YouTube video and fix a lot of what they
| claim is unfixable or too dangerous to fix.
|
| Considering that, WTF am I supposed to believe when I read an
| article like this and someone is saying that biotech isn't as
| complicated as the profit driven institutions claim? There's got
| to be _some_ truth to it if they behave the same as the
| electronics industry, right? Or am I sliding into anti-vaxxer
| territory?
|
| No matter what, I think it would be a great step forward if we
| stopped accepting deceit and disinformation as being a normal
| thing for large corporations and institutions to engage in. We
| have so many provable examples in the electronic repair industry
| alone that I think it's endemic. Maybe if the big companies
| didn't lie so much, there would be less distrust and less of an
| opportunity for people to spread misinformation and propaganda.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I agree that's an important bar, but intentional misinformation
| purveyors will learn to use that language too if necessary.
| It's necessary but not sufficient.
|
| Note: I dont' think this guy should have been removed from
| youtube, and have no reason to doubt the veracity of his story,
| it seems plausible and interesting.
| bserge wrote:
| Everybody back to your own domains and hosting (not fucking
| Amazon!). If your server provider bans you, _then_ we have a real
| problem.
| johnhenry wrote:
| I wonder if the video had prominent "Don't try this at home"
| warnings?
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| The whole point of his video and work is to democratize
| science. He sells kits to let you do genetics science at home.
| Ie, a disclaimer would not make sense considering his objective
| phkahler wrote:
| >> monopoly speech platforms are also sloppily banning any form
| of science that doesn't come from 'ordained' sources.
|
| It's not just that. The real message is that individuals are not
| able to make decisions or do things for themselves. This is why
| any medical treatment that doesn't involve surgery or
| prescriptions is thrown in with homeopathy and general quackery.
| It's not just companies either, individuals will look at you
| funny if you do anything not sanctioned by some perceived source
| of truth.
| [deleted]
| swayvil wrote:
| My body my choice.
|
| No, you're not qualified to make that choice.
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Nobody has to use YouTube. There are many other video
| hosting/watching platforms. None of them are especially popular
| because they get filled with a lot of junk, because they
| attract the people who can't host their content on YouTube.
|
| In a way, this dynamic is an effective, natural check on
| moderation. If moderation primarily removes stuff that most
| people think is junk, then alternatives competing on reduced
| moderation will be junk. If moderation removes valuable stuff
| that lots of people want, then other platforms that host it
| instead will receive more traffic and legitimacy.
|
| It's kind of like the Reddit vs. Voat thing. Reddit isn't
| great, but Voat ended up a cesspool, because Reddit's biggest
| exoduses were driven by hate groups.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Nonsense. A monopoly does not conform to the rules a "normal"
| company does. Rumble does not compete with YouTube, because a
| generation of uploaders have put essentially every piece of
| TV, music, movies, conference proceedings, and every other
| form of media on YouTube.
|
| If you're wondering if something unusual is online, you would
| always look on YouTube first. And then stay there.
| breckenedge wrote:
| I disagree. You're confusing network effects with monopoly.
| YouTube is not a monopoly.
| [deleted]
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > In general, I think I understand where the criticism is coming
| from. Every time I post on social media about being deplatformed,
| banned, or silenced, someone chimes in with their own story about
| being banned because "big government is trying to suppress the
| fact that echinacea cures Covid" or whatever. Spoiler, echinacea
| doesn't cure Covid, but this is the kind of crazy nonsense my
| work is compared to. Are you a credential person? Great, I'm a
| scientist with a PhD from one of the top universities in the
| world. I've worked at NASA. I've published a number of papers.
|
| I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the
| necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've
| published 'a number of papers.'" Lol.
|
| > The problem isn't my thoroughly detailed research, which I
| would love to have critiqued in good faith. The problem is big
| tech companies making billions of dollars aren't capable of doing
| basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can,
| which is why the best they're capable of on the pandemic front,
| for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post
| that mentions "Covid" or "vaccine."
|
| Indeed. They are not capable of doing basic analysis of every
| video, or hiring a team that can. Billions of dollars aren't
| enough to hire a team to analyze every video on youtube.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Unfortunately, the "echinacea cures Covid" claim probably isn't
| true, but the CDC and YouTube people seem to have decided that
| ANY claims about therapeutics must be suppressed. There isn't
| any objective reason for this; it's purely political side-
| taking.
|
| As for your research: are you saying there are _no_ forums
| where your work can be "critiqued in good faith"? Or just that
| YouTube isn't that forum? Because you're right -- it isn't.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| >I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the
| necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've
| published 'a number of papers.'" Lol.
|
| There are situations where you have someone who truly has deep
| merit meeting someone who believes they do and who and tries to
| relate to the former, but is so far disconnected that they have
| categorically different experience which immediately
| disqualifies the latter, but the general public would be unable
| to recognize, yet it would take significant effort for the
| former to explain the situation to an extent the public could
| understand, and at risk to the emotions and ego of the latter.
| Surely you can relate to this situation to some extent?
| perihelions wrote:
| Also covered by _Reason_ (whose reporting on Zayner was likewise
| censored),
|
| https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-re... (
| _" Why Did YouTube Remove This Reason Video?"_)
|
| edit: Here's a complete transcript of the censored material, post
| by Eugene Volokh
|
| https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/17/youtube-removes-march-2...
| Imnimo wrote:
| I do sympathize with him, and I think his specific content should
| be available on YouTube, but I can also see why YouTube would
| want to ban him. If I'm YouTube, and I don't really understand
| anything about biohacking, do I really want to take the risk of
| promoting material about making your own vaccines? Sure, this
| guy's content is informative and valuable, but it wouldn't be
| long before you have someone less competent promoting a self-made
| vaccine that kills someone. If YouTube doesn't feel it has the
| expertise to distinguish the two, I can see why it would be
| prudent to just ban them all.
| daenz wrote:
| >Trust is antithetical to science.
|
| Never heard it put this way before, but I think I agree with it.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and
| Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material.
|
| The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about
| experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems
| to categorically reject for some reason, while home made
| bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't
| follow at all.
|
| Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing
| home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who
| follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell
| dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the
| incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former
| in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube.
|
| 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's
| not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can
| read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at
| home from misinformation is absurd. The correct platform for
| something like this is a separate forum or community where
| enthusiasts meet with some barrier to entry, not the mass media.
|
| I immediately question the motive of someone who promotes
| individual science or 'hacking' and seeks the largest mass media
| audience. I think the motive is much more straight forward. The
| author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to
| people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him
| financially.
| reginold wrote:
| Agreed - the lesson here is platforms like YouTube have a lot
| more control than most assume. An easy to use, censorship
| resistant, video host seems needed.
| vippy wrote:
| That's an interesting, and entirely unrelated, takeaway given
| what Barrin92 wrote.
| ssijak wrote:
| I don't understand this social platforms.
|
| Covid stuff and fake news aside, I reported maybe 20 times
| obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of
| violence against a group of people and similar stuff where
| 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without
| question, and only once they did remove it. All the other times I
| get a message that they reviewed my complaint, that it does not
| go against their standards/tos/bla bla, and that I can block the
| video/post/channel for myself.
|
| And taking into account how many random stuff they ban
| proactively, it just does not compute in my logic board in the
| brain.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Most things are badly done. Most social media companies are not
| doing moderation well. Fitting the general pattern of most
| things are garbage. But some things are not! Find them and
| treasure them.
| nix0n wrote:
| A few days ago, I learned that "Facebook has exempted high-
| profile users from some or all of its rules"[0]. Maybe there's
| something like that happening on youtube also.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121
| ravi-delia wrote:
| It's the same way ADHD is both under- and over- diagnosed. If
| you're bad enough at your job, you can both miss the majority
| of content that is harmful, and wind up taking down
| significantly more false positives than truly harmful material.
| peter303 wrote:
| Isaacsons new book Code Breakers about CRISPR has a couple
| positive chapters on Zaynor. (Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs in
| his final months for the definitive biography.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think that's a typo and I'm after Josiah Zayner, the author
| of the the article here?
|
| Thanks for the connection, that book looks really interesting.
| carlisle_ wrote:
| My question is how can platforms ensure only "good" science is
| done at the scale they operate at? So many pseudosciences hide
| behind jargon, how much scientific education is required to
| delineate between the two at the velocity people want? A company
| might take two weeks to review and approve a flagged post, but
| isn't the damage already done for how these platforms operate?
| reginold wrote:
| What's the best video platform that supports open standards and
| censorship resistance?
|
| Is self-hosting the only option?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| At the core of YouTube's censorship is the idea that people
| aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos
| they should watch. They don't know what's good for them.
|
| Whatever you may think of that idea, surely the idea that
| YouTube, which reduces down to a bunch of people sitting behind
| desks, should get to decide what others watch is questionable.
| That is, they think a small group of people are wiser and more
| intelligent than everyone and should get to curate and censor
| content for the majority at will.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > surely the idea that YouTube, which reduces down to a bunch
| of people sitting behind desks, should get to decide what
| others watch is questionable
|
| That's been the value-add of YouTube since the day they
| implemented preference-learning and recommendations, and it
| continues to be one of their distinguishing factors in the
| marketplace of alternatives.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _At the core of YouTube 's censorship is the idea that people
| aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos
| they should watch. They don't know what's good for them._
|
| I'm not sure I'd agree. I think that's putting far too much
| faith in them.
|
| YouTube's goal, roughly stated, is "More Hours Watched." This,
| in whatever form is appropriate, is pretty much the end goal of
| _any_ social media sharing handwave etc platform. More eyeball-
| hours to sell ads to.
|
| For a while, YouTube's algorithms (which I think are almost
| certainly too dumb to have any idea what a video is about)
| pushed conspiracy theory content for the simple reason that if
| you can get someone watching conspiracy theory content on
| YouTube, they're very likely to continue watching conspiracy
| theory content on YouTube. Of the people who watch video 1234,
| 30% of them then watch dramatically more YouTube afterwards, so
| the more people you can show video 1234 to, the more hours will
| be watched - think "paperclip maximizer," not "Muahaha, we will
| drive people down conspiracy rabbit holes!"
|
| Of course, do this long enough, and eventually you have a
| problem - bad press coverage about how you're driving people
| down conspiracy rabbit holes. Whoops. But the problem here,
| from YouTube's perspective, isn't that you're driving people
| down conspiracy theory rabbit holes - it's the standard tech
| industry problem that you're getting bad press for it. Bad
| press is bad for hours viewed. So you fix the problem, and
| issue the standard tech industry appy polly loggy - "We are so,
| so sorry you caught us doing this and we will do the work to
| ensure that you don't catch us doing it in the future."
|
| I don't think YouTube particularly cares about Covid
| misinformation or [whatever]. They care about the bad press
| from being seen hosting it, which might impact people's opinion
| of them and reduce hours watched.
|
| To claim that the algorithms understand anything beyond the
| title or such is to claim a capability that has no evidence for
| existing.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _A day after YouTube took down my video, I received an email.
| They banned me for life. This is not only to say I could no
| longer upload content. I could no longer even login._
|
| We are, sadly, _long_ since past the time that cloud providers,
| free content hosting, YouTube, etc, has to be considered hostile
| to anything outside the tech industry 's consensus of what's
| allowed (as interpreted by their algorithms, which they like to
| pretend are fancy, but seem only barely smarter than keyword
| matching, except when they're rather dumber). Of course, due to
| Scale(TM), you can't actually have any _humans_ in the loop.
| Unless, of course, you 're well enough connected to get a bit of
| a rise on a tech news site, at which point a human will (usually)
| step in, mutter something about a mistake, fix the problem (the
| actual problem being the bad PR created), and go on their way.
|
| If you're posting funny reaction videos to nonsense content,
| sure, use YouTube. For anything serious, this is no longer a good
| idea (well, if you're outside the tech industry consensus for
| whatever that is today).
|
| But if you are even the slightest bit outside the mainstream, you
| probably shouldn't be using YouTube, or even the various cloud
| based hosting services. Your own server, in a local datacenter,
| perhaps fronted by CloudFront, is closer to the right answer
| anymore.
|
| In the rush to free services, we've handed far, _far_ too much
| power to a very small set of companies, who are now happy to use
| that power to turn the internet into only what they want to hear.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Plenty of serious content survives on YouTube.
|
| I'd say posting something at the intersection of fringe and
| dangerous can get your content canned, and unfortunately for
| the article author, "How to cook a COVID-19 vaccine in your
| kitchen" is in that category.
| [deleted]
| ftrobro wrote:
| "Democratizing genetic engineering won't suddenly unleash
| bioterrorism upon the world."
|
| How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power
| has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would
| not want to see it "democratized".
| bserge wrote:
| A motivated party can deploy and detonate several bombs in
| places with a lot of people any day, Covid rules
| notwithstanding.
|
| It's laughably/terrifyingly easy, the hardest part is building
| or buying the bombs.
|
| But you don't see it done regularly at all.
|
| Granted, a single nuclear or bio attack would affect way more
| people.
| [deleted]
| frazbin wrote:
| Yeah I was with him up to that point.
|
| "None of the kits we sell contain anything dangerous, nor is
| the average person experimenting with biology inherently
| dangerous. If you are trying to engineer something hazardous --
| like say a bat virus -- you might have a problem, but the
| genome search space is large enough that accidentally creating
| a harmful organism is astronomically improbable. Access to most
| dangerous materials are also heavily restricted..."
|
| This sounds really sketchy to me. I can't tell if he's lying or
| if he really can't see any further than his own research
| program.. sometimes a field of research is just actually
| existentially dangerous for life on earth, you can't handwave
| it away.
|
| The possibility of biohacking as a hobby is thrilling. Trouble
| is, the dangers are so extreme they're difficult to even think
| about. Like, thought experiment: can you design a virus that
| kills all eukaryotic cells? Can you think of other
| possibilities equally terrifying? Of course stuff like that is
| far off, but neither you nor this guy know whether 'far off'
| means 10, 100, or 1000 years.
|
| We already have examples of substances that are strictly
| harmful to almost all life.. Dispersal of them (via the
| democratization of access to Chemistry) is already placing
| stress on the biosphere.. which again, is such a large and
| horrible thing it's hard to imagine or reason about.
|
| Another thing: it is still plausible that covid was a lab
| escape. I think the biohacker community should be incredibly
| humbled by that, and really think about how they'll be seen in
| decades to come.. we've seen cycles of technologists becoming
| disgraced because of the impact of their products; those cycles
| seem poised to accelerate. Maybe this is a good time to get on
| the right side of history?
| sjtindell wrote:
| Do you see any comparison to Machine Learning? I get the
| impression he considers himself like a hobbyist running some
| models on their home GPU. Without access to server farms,
| there is an almost zero percent chance a home hobbyist
| invents an AI capable of displacing large amounts of human
| workers or setting off nukes on its own. AI is dangerous, but
| can be explored safely by a small practitioner. Perhaps these
| biomaterials are more sensitive though.
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Ai isn't really at risk of escaping the lab and afflicting
| a population with something. I mean, deep fakes went online
| and that will afflict people, but that's not the same: the
| closer parallel is "a technique for bio hacking escaped his
| computer," which is different than "I accidentally/sort-of-
| not-accidentally made mosquitos extinct in my region
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Live biomaterials are _self-replicating_. That 's one
| difference between biotech and any other scary tech we're
| used to dealing with, like explosives, dangerous chemicals
| or nuclear material. Even ML scales only as fast as you can
| buy compute and convince companies and governments to put
| your algorithms to use. Self-replication is another game
| entirely.
| autoliteInline wrote:
| I wonder if there isn't a market for a COVID vaccine that the
| inevitable variants aren't resistant to.
|
| If you kept it to a small group of customers, it would maintain
| it's value and be worth $$$$ to them potentially.
| [deleted]
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| That's certainly the future.
|
| Mass vaccination might have made it better for costs on tptb in
| the past. But, if that doesn't work because a sufficient amount
| of the population refuses to cooperate...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| AFAIK, variants are not "resistant" to vaccines, they are just
| different, so a vaccine targeting the previous strand will be
| less effective because it doesn't match perfectly.
|
| There is no better vaccine than the one for the current
| dominant variants. You can't really target future mutations
| because you don't know what the future mutations will be. You
| can imagine restricting the best, most current vaccine to the
| rich to limit escape mutations but besides the obvious ethical
| concerns, the virus will mutate anyways. Better vaccinate
| everyone with the best, because the less people infected, the
| less chances you give the virus to mutate.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Current vaccines aren't optimized for the currently dominant
| Covid strains, they're optimized for the Covid strains that
| were around a year and a half ago.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem, IMO, with the current vaccination system is not
| that lots of people aren't getting their shots with the
| available vaccines (although that's sad); the problem is how
| many hoops have to be jumped through to get the vaccines on the
| market at all. The GOP could have legitimately criticized Big
| Government on this if they hadn't swallowed all the stupid.
| Freedom doesn't mean just the freedom to decline a vaccine; it
| means the freedom to act without the government's permission.
| ve55 wrote:
| The potential costs of systemically removing correct but
| controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to
| scientific progress in general. Sure, we remove thousands of
| obviously false and likely harmful posts, and there are cases to
| be made for why that may be good, but sometimes hidden within
| those thousands of posts was something that may have had a
| tremendously positive effect, but yet could not be separated from
| the noise.
|
| "The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because we're
| already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most
| major tech platforms. This system seems to be helpful in some
| areas until it makes some mistakes, in which case the effects are
| catastrophic.
|
| Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work" was
| considered misinformation along with "a vaccine is likely to
| happen within a year or two", along with "this may be related to
| a lab leak", along with... Reality is always changing and
| uncertain and our policies should reflect that we do not have it
| all figured out, nor will we (collectively) ever. (Edit: as one
| commenter expressed skepticism of the mask claim, read over a
| link like
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_...
| about how normal people felt about masks in the first few months
| of covid. It's pretty shocking and I feel like I'm living in an
| alternate reality just re-reading it and the top responses).
|
| Now that our infrastructure is being expanded and built out with
| censoring of 'incorrect' information as a top priority, I fear
| for how bad the mistakes we make in the future may be.
| reginold wrote:
| Yeah the whole "censoring" stuff ratcheted up really fast.
| Kinda crazy.
| Animats wrote:
| It's scary.
|
| Imagine the US five years from now, with Team Trump in charge
| of the censoring.
| reginold wrote:
| Banning Trump from Twitter...the pendulum will indeed swing
| the other way. How long do we have.
|
| The clock is ticking on open source, decentralized
| solutions. Nothing else is relevant.
| hnisfullofshit wrote:
| HackerNews is _notorious_ for censoring anything that falls
| outside its groupthink or threatens a portfolio company. It
| 's actually one of the more aggressive censors on the
| internet.
|
| Case in point from this very thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28558254
|
| There is no free speech here.
| reginold wrote:
| Curious to hear more about this. Is censorship "removal" or
| simply not getting votes? I've seen this concept generally
| addressed here before as "we don't censor, people just vote
| this way"
| hnisfullofshit wrote:
| It was flagged by a mod.
| detaro wrote:
| flagging is something normal users can do.
| [deleted]
| donmcronald wrote:
| > The potential costs of systemically removing correct but
| controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to
| scientific progress in general.
|
| I fall pretty strongly on the side of combatting
| misinformation, but I disagree with outright removal of
| content. I think it should be flagged as misinformation, but
| left available. Put another way, I'm a fan of labelling, not
| censoring.
|
| I want transparency. "Our misinformation bot rated this as a
| 90% chance of being misinformation because XYZ." I bet the only
| reason we can't have that is because the ML bots suck so much
| the tech industry is scared to implement any system that might
| be open to scrutiny or analysis. It's a bit ironic.
| reginold wrote:
| Appreciate this perspective here. I'm against censorship, and
| am surprised how clear your "label not remove" concept is. I
| like it.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no such thing as a bot which can identify
| misinformation with 90% accuracy.
|
| Google has some very advanced natural language processing
| technology. Try this Google search: "What year did Neil
| Armstrong land on Mars?"
| dragonsky67 wrote:
| Wow, unless you happen to know that the Sea of Tranquility
| is on the moon (seas on the moon, no way), then you are
| well on your way to believing that Armstrong is relaxing on
| a Martian beach....
| nine_k wrote:
| Marking is helpful. Removal is not.
|
| Very much like spam: filters are good but not 100% good, so
| there must be a way to look at what the filter has rejected,
| and allow the reader to judge.
| perihelions wrote:
| YouTube's ML bots flagged an episode of Michael Osterholm's
| podcast. If you're unfamiliar, that's a former COVID advisor
| to President Biden.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28003635
| tidalmcmuffin wrote:
| Funny I replied to you saying that you're false about the mask
| statement and HN censored me! Real free speech platform you
| guys have here. The irony considering what I was replying to!!
| [deleted]
| tidalmcmuffin wrote:
| > Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work"
| was considered misinformation
|
| No, because that never happened. Maybe don't spread
| misinformation yourself if you want to make a point.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >"The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because
| we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science
| on most major tech platforms.
|
| I think the keyword that, in my mind, justifies the censorship
| here is "on most major tech platforms". Nobody is banning the
| discussion of these ideas in academic journals or HN or other
| places where curious people can go to discuss things - it's
| just making sure unverified, potentially dangerous theories
| aren't spreading like wildfire amongst the general population
| who _aren't_ curious and will assume whatever they're reading
| is absolute truth.
| hnisfullofshit wrote:
| You can't actually discuss anything on HN that goes against
| the moderator's petty ideologies (or yc's profit motive)
| without being censored. Turn on show dead and take a scroll
| through nearly any topic.
|
| The irony is that many of the people who claim to be free-
| speech see nothing wrong with this platform blacklisting
| people who don't share in the groupthink.
| liamwire wrote:
| I feel this is a dishonest take. I've seen the moderators
| leave up some pretty egregious violations of the site rules
| because it fostered good discussion, which seems to be at
| the heart of HN.
|
| However, good discussion ultimately requires respect for
| one another, and it seems maybe that thinking is not
| bilateral in your case. I'd encourage you to introspect on
| why you may be finding resistance wherever you look.
| nradov wrote:
| That's such an arrogant, condescending statement. You're
| assuming that the general population is too stupid to be
| trusted with unfiltered information. But theories aren't
| dangerous. Actions are dangerous.
| amrocha wrote:
| I think social media has proven pretty conclusively that
| giving the general population unfiltered information and
| enabling everyone to promote whatever they want is in fact
| a terrible idea
| [deleted]
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