[HN Gopher] Twitter bans ads that contradict science on climate ...
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Twitter bans ads that contradict science on climate change
Author : DocFeind
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-04-23 16:58 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| The "scientific consensus" was once in favor of tobacco smoking.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| That's a myth. Read more on the history of that.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I have. One of my favorite highlights:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| What is your point? Are you taking issue with the current
| corpus of evidence that exists around climate change?
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| the single biggest thing we can do to slow down climate change is
| to drastically rethink our zoning policy.
|
| why do I need to get in a car and drive 10 minutes to grab some
| milk? because none of the land in the next few miles is zoned for
| a grocery store! We need to allow mixed use so that a lot of
| current errands that need a car could be easily performed on a
| bike.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's definitely one of the reasons I don't live in the USA or
| in Russia.
|
| You guys spend too much time driving.
|
| The CO2 impact from cars is not that high though. Probably
| carbon sequestration is a fastest / cheapest route.
| nharada wrote:
| Everyone in this thread talking about how "science is never
| settled" and maybe that's true, but this move isn't designed to
| discredit some competing scientists, it's designed to shutdown
| bad-faith propaganda paid for by oil companies and other
| entrenched interests.
|
| Curious how y'all would propose combating this type of
| misinformation. Or is this just something we should accept as a
| necessary evil on any platform?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around
| the earth, and you were put under house arrest if you published
| anything contradicting that.
|
| Then there was that scientific consensus that margarine was good
| for you and eggs caused heart attacks.
|
| Or that scientific consensus that disease could be cured by
| draining the bad blood out of your body.
|
| Or that scientific consensus that if you sailed west too far,
| you'd fall off the edge of the world.
|
| Or my favorite scientific consensus that in order to ensure a
| good harvest, it was necessary to chop the hearts out of your
| enemies and offer it to the gods.
| BryantD wrote:
| Heck, scientific consensus used to be that airborne diseases
| were transmitted by droplets. Whoops.
|
| The interesting thing about every single one of these examples
| is that consensus was able to change without anyone having to
| advertise on Twitter.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| To be fair, those models were overturned by other scientists
| publishing their findings. Not randos taking out billboards.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Check out what happened to Galileo when he published his
| findings. Want more? How about Lysenkoism? Or the rejection
| of "jewish science"?
| tzs wrote:
| Galileo's problems weren't due to his findings and theories
| going against the current consensus. Galileo's problems
| were a combination of:
|
| 1. His heliocentric theory wasn't actually noticeably
| better at explaining observations than the current
| geocentric theories. Galileo, like the Church, believed in
| a universe intelligently designed by an all-powerful God,
| and he believed that said God would of course choose laws
| of physics that were mathematically beautiful and elegant.
| He had to hand wave away things that didn't fit with his
| notion of mathematically beautiful and elegant as optical
| illusions or observational error, which is not very
| convincing.
|
| 2. His ego. He was a celebrity who was frequently invited
| to hang out with the rich and powerful, which he loved.
|
| 3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant of and rude to
| those he considered to be his rivals or his inferiors (and
| because of his big ego "inferiors" included pretty much
| everyone else).
|
| 4. He had a very poor sense of politics. He failed to
| realize or ignored that some of those rivals or inferiors
| that was a major asshole towards either were politically
| powerful or had better connections than he did to
| politically powerful people, and they could cause that
| power to be used to make his life miserable if he kept
| being a major asshole to them.
|
| There's a great detailed look at the road to replacing
| geocentricism with heliocentricism here [1].
|
| [1] http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-
| ptolemaic-smac...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Galileo observed the phases of Venus and the moons of
| Jupiter, which provided strong evidence that contradicted
| geocentric theories.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| None of which is relevant to a social media company
| restricting ads.
| vl wrote:
| But it's different this time.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > chop the hearts out
|
| That's where we went off the rails. It was the _livers_ we were
| supposed to offer up.
|
| No wonder everything since then is so screwed.
| driverdan wrote:
| This is a bad faith argument. If you want to be taken seriously
| at least try to use good faith.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| I totally disagree - he's demonstrating that what appeared to
| be the scientific consensus on several occasions in the past
| was completely wrong.
| spidersouris wrote:
| I must say I find it quite dishonest and hypocritical to
| use examples of theories which didn't impact humans' lives
| at all, or, if they did, only on the level of an individual
| -- to use these examples as a comparison with climate
| change. These beliefs have nothing to do with climate
| change which effects have already started being visible for
| decades now. This has nothing to do with medicine, it's
| biology, geology, meteorology. Hundreds of species are
| disappearing, sea level rises are undeniable, temperatures
| are rising as well and forest fires are increasing. These
| are facts.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Exactly, it's like how the current scientific consensus is
| that the earth is round, but many enterprising individuals
| are busy trying to prove their theory that the earth is
| flat.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Please remember the HN ethos of assuming good intent. I'd be
| interested in hearing the problem(s) you have with the parent
| post.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Twitter is not banning ads that contradicts "scientific
| consensus".
|
| They are banning ads which contradicts the current
| scientific consensus on climate change.
|
| Do you see the difference?
| WalterBright wrote:
| What's bad faith about it?
| dlivingston wrote:
| Several things, but to name one, none of those examples are
| actually representing "scientific consensus" (except for
| the margarine example, and medical science is notoriously
| tricky and subject to _lots_ of noise and false signals).
|
| Science didn't even "exist" until the 1600s - well after
| the timeframes of nearly all of those examples. [0]
|
| Your examples demonstrate "social consensus", "religious
| consensus", "proto-medical consensus", but not "scientific
| consensus."
|
| [0]: a note that to say "science started at time X" is
| subjective, of course, but the modern formal framework of
| science is relatively new and putting it around the time of
| Isaac Newton's _Principia_ is probably a good rough guess.
|
| I would not consider Galileo to be a representative of
| modern science, more of a precursor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Whatever consensus you wish to call it, it was the
| consensus of those in power in society at the time that
| believed they knew the truth.
|
| Galileo was a scientist whether scientist was a
| recognized term at the time or not. He made observations,
| and developed theories based on those observations.
| That's science.
|
| George Washington's death was hastened by doctors who
| bled him, 200 years after 1600.
|
| And how about Darwin's theories, Lysenkoism, Phrenology,
| etc.?
| dlivingston wrote:
| > Whatever consensus you wish to call it, it was the
| consensus of those in power in society at the time that
| believed they knew the truth.
|
| Your definition here is an apt one, and your examples
| demonstrate this particular effect well.
|
| My beef is that you framed them as 'examples of when the
| scientific consensus was wrong' when they do not
| demonstrate 'scientific consensus.'
| yongjik wrote:
| > The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved
| around the earth ...
|
| Ever thought about why it took so long for this particular
| "scientific consensus" was reverted? Because geocentrism could
| explain the motions of planets pretty accurately, and the
| easiest _actual_ evidence of heliocentrism was that apparent
| locations of stars should move _very_ slightly following the
| motion of the Earth (i.e., parallax) - the effect was so small
| that the first measurement was made in 1838, about 200 years
| after Galileo 's death. Until then, the apparent absence of
| parallax was a scientific evidence _against_ heliocentrism.
|
| The lesson to draw is that it's not sufficient to have its
| proponent put under house arrest in order for a new theory to
| be accepted by the scientific community. Your new theory has to
| first explain all the things explained by the existing theory,
| and then some more that can _not_ be explained by the existing
| one.
|
| I'll leave it to readers to conclude what that means in the
| context of global warming.
|
| Honestly I'm depressed by the level of discourse here.
| Otherwise mostly intelligent people are basically resorting to
| "Well some groups of people have been wrong about various
| things before, which proves that this particular (unrelated)
| group of people _can_ be wrong, so instead of addressing the
| problem they say we have, let 's debate for the umpteenth time
| whether the problem is real, again."
|
| It's a classical stalling tactic, and IMHO the only proper
| response is "Get out, adults are talking."
| kurupt213 wrote:
| I don't think there is any evidence against the last one.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the
| contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be
| right, which means that he or she has results that are
| verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus
| is irrelevant.
|
| The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because
| they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as
| consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's
| science, it isn't consensus.
|
| Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is
| not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists
| agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is
| 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak
| that way.
| 8note wrote:
| Science relies heavily on a consensus of observations and a
| consensus on the analysis of those observations. Reproduction
| is creating aa consensus
|
| Plenty of scientists have broken with consensus without a new
| consensus forming around their models.
|
| "Scientists have consensus about X" is something science
| communicators say. It's about how easy it is to describe the
| evidence to laypeople than what the evidence is.
| dudul wrote:
| Reminds me of the old south park episode where 2 ultra scientific
| factions fight over some silly religious-like details.
|
| Science shouldn't be treated like a religion. Consensus in
| science changes all the time. New things are discovered and
| invented by Goin against the concensus.
| dlivingston wrote:
| Right, my fear with treating climate change as "settled,
| absolute, unquestionable wisdom" is that this puritanical
| attitude towards science potentially stymies researchers from
| postulating radical new ideas, or prevents other researchers
| from taking radical ideas seriously.
|
| To be clear, anthropogenic climate change is definitely a
| thing, and those who say it isn't are either gaslighting or
| being gaslit.
|
| But even though Newton was right, Einstein was "more right."
| Could an Einstein exist in climate science today, going against
| the "Settled Science(tm)?"
| seoaeu wrote:
| So climate change deniers are engaging in gaslighting, but
| you don't think we should do anything to stop them... because
| maybe one of them stumbles on a scientific breakthrough?
| dlivingston wrote:
| > So climate change deniers are engaging in gaslighting
|
| Sometimes. Oftentimes they have just been lied to by
| political or cultural institutions that they trust.
|
| > but you don't think we should do anything to stop them
|
| It greatly depends on the context. In the case of ads on
| Twitter, I have no opinion as I'm not familiar enough with
| the nuances of this action to make a judgement.
|
| > because maybe one of them stumbles on a scientific
| breakthrough
|
| That's a misreading of my comment. My point was that a
| serious climate scientist may be afraid of pushing past the
| boundaries for fear of going against the very real
| orthodoxy. The orthodoxy, by the way, is a social thing,
| not a science thing. Many scientists have gotten
| 'cancelled' by randos on Twitter for publishing standard
| research.
| 8note wrote:
| If you're proposing a radical idea via advertising, where are
| you getting the money to buy the ads from?
|
| Why are we limiting radical idea creation to the rich?
| onos wrote:
| Another voice here not happy about this. It's as if the advocates
| here have no interest in learning anything from the history of
| science as a practice of argument by evidence. Banning arguments
| doesn't convince anyone paying attention that the opponents are
| wrong it just makes people suspicious that the banners can't
| defend their positions.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Go publish evidence in a scientific journal or stop pretending
| you're a scientist.
| samatman wrote:
| Hey, except for all the science which never enters journals,
| and all the nonsense which does, it's a great criterion!
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Do most people on Twitter spend their time reading
| countervailing evidence in scientific journals?
| owisd wrote:
| It's not banning arguments, just recognising that twitter ads
| aren't the best medium for certain arguments.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| "It's not banning arguments, just recognising that the public
| sphere isn't the best place for certain arguments."
|
| And so on. That feels like a slippery slope to me.
| [deleted]
| owisd wrote:
| That's like saying banning electing of representatives by a
| show of hands in favour of the secret ballot is just a
| slippery slope to banning democracy altogether.
| wtallis wrote:
| > That feels like a slippery slope to me.
|
| It only feels like a slippery slope if you make no attempt
| to think about _why_ Twitter is a bad place for certain
| kinds of debate, and instead assume that whatever traits
| make Twitter bad for that generalize to the entire public
| sphere.
| elicash wrote:
| Worth noting that political ads are already banned on Twitter and
| have been for a couple years:
|
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952?ref_src=...
|
| In practice, this leads to weird scenarios where Exxon can run
| promotional ads but climate groups can't run ads in opposition.
|
| I'm not saying this is the wrong policy necessarily, just that
| "politics" is a tricky thing to define. Labor unions can't run
| ads saying workers should demand more pay, but Amazon can run ads
| saying their jobs pay good wages.
|
| Edit: Also, I tried to find the original post but the blog is
| down, at least for the moment for me. https://blog.twitter.com --
| anyway, here's a cached version:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ADXc6W...
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I guess this also shows the limits of communities where the
| topic is basically everything
| wraithgourd wrote:
| They removed Danny Devito's blue check mark when he supported
| the Nabisco union or whatever.
|
| Twitter is so close to being perfect, I hope they fix it...
| Gorgo wrote:
| Twitter is close to being the perfect perpetual rage
| generator, is that what you meant by calling it 'close to
| being perfect'? The format in combination with their
| nefarious algorithm makes for a nearly perfect polarisation
| machine where you're either 'with' or 'against' how Twitter-
| the-company wants you to think.
| chefandy wrote:
| Twitter said that's not why they removed the blue check and
| it was re-added. Not that I trust press-releases but that
| seems like it would be a bit of a departure for them.
| pydry wrote:
| The timing suggests that an automated system was tripped by
| a deluge of malicious abuse reports.
|
| I'd say that's pretty in character.
| chefandy wrote:
| If that supposition is even true, Twitter removing a blue
| check because he publicly supported a union-- the initial
| implication to which I replied-- and twitter removing and
| restoring a blue check because people exploited their
| abuse reporting system are two very different things.
| pydry wrote:
| Yes, and twitter is kind of shit either way - this is
| being the sole implication I got from the OP.
|
| The timing still undeniably connects the two events and
| in spite of it _likely_ being due to abuse of their abuse
| button they still didnt admit that.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| > The timing still undeniably connects the two events
|
| Not taking any sides here, but correlation does not equal
| causation.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > Twitter is so close to being perfect, I hope they fix it...
|
| LOL, I couldn't disagree more. Twitter is profoundly broken.
| Scams to UX, pretty much every aspect of it is subpar.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Twitter is so close to being perfect_
|
| That's an unusual take... Twitter is pretty widely regarded
| as about as far as perfect as it can get, putting it mildly -
| and this is across the political spectrum. I'm curious to
| understand your perspective on why you believe twitter is
| near perfect.
| ms4720 wrote:
| Perfectly so
| jesushax wrote:
| This is basically a good thing, but I'm always annoyed by the use
| of "science" like this, making it into an institution with a
| unified voice. If they used the word 'consensus' or 'studies' the
| claim would sound weaker, and they want to give it the weight of
| a quasi-religious absolute.
|
| Which is great for the tactical, rhetorical power of their
| argument, but plants the seed of their strategic downfall. If you
| do this enough, "science" is lowered to a political device
| commanding the same respect as sociology did in the Soviet Union
| (or even in the US, at this point), ie less than nothing.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| Every generally accepted theory starts out as a theory held by
| one. And sometimes directly contradicting the consensus.
|
| We think independently for a reason. Not submitting to the
| PERCEIVED consensus is a good thing. It means we can have
| different deeply committed people investigating different
| theories at the same time, rather than waiting for a central
| authority, financed with other people's money, to give up on
| one and pick up the next when it finally gets over its ego.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's fine to have competing explanations for the available
| evidence. But that's not what anti-science political
| positions usually look like. Rejecting both the evidence and
| the explanation without justification or alternative is
| completely different from reasonable scientific dissent.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Right. The vast majority of people rejecting global warming
| are doing it for irrational reasons.
|
| But Twitters rule would also exclude earnest differences of
| opinions. During law school, my class had a talk that
| included a tenured climate scientist at our university (a
| major research institution). He had a non-census view of
| climate change that predicted warming 25-50% less than UN
| models. A bunch of law professors came and read him the
| riot act for DENYING SCIENCE. It was crazy. That's exactly
| the type of censorship big tech is engaging in.
| pornel wrote:
| Twitter ads are not the place to overturn scientific
| consensus, especially not such an important and well-
| established topic. If you have material new information,
| write a paper, get it verified/replicated, etc.
| mach1ne wrote:
| > rather than waiting for a central authority, financed with
| other people's money, to give up on one and pick up the next
| when it finally gets over its ego.
|
| Arguably, currently the ego problem is very real with the
| individuals who hold power in academia due to status quo. I
| don't think the development of science would significantly
| change even if there was a central authority - it might even
| speed up, since the people making the decision would not have
| their careers dependent on preserving the current consensus.
| elicash wrote:
| Good news for you. Here's a direct quote from their post, which
| I believe their blog is currently down so don't blame you for
| not finding it:
|
| > To better serve these conversations, misleading
| advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific
| consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our
| inappropriate content policy.
| torstenvl wrote:
| That's more honest, but also more obviously problematic.
| Thank God publishing platforms didn't prohibit contradicting
| the scientific consensus on, say, Newtonian physics in the
| early 20th century.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Are you just severely confused? Do you think that Newtonian
| physics received its scrutiny through media advertising?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Yeah, if Einstein hadn't been able to take out those full
| page ads in the Times relativity might never have gotten
| off the ground.
| elicash wrote:
| I think your point of view is a valid one, but I saw my
| role with my comment on just correcting facts. They hadn't
| realized that Twitter had in fact used the word
| "consensus." I was not offering a view either way. In that
| spirit, I'd also note for you that this new policy applies
| specifically to advertising. Not to what you can post. You
| can still be opposed to this policy, for reasonable
| reasons, but just to clarify.
| tshaddox wrote:
| But wasn't the scientific consensus already that Newtonian
| physics was unable to explain certain observations, i.e.
| everyone already knew Newtonian physics was false? It's not
| like Einstein just published a paper that said "nuh uh, all
| the experts are full of shit and here's why..." and then
| proceeded to use powerful rhetoric to convince everyone
| they had been wrong.
| jesushax wrote:
| Oh I don't fault Twitter in particularly, just whoever
| decided on the title of that specific article (so I guess the
| AP people in this case). Like, if an article was titled
| "Science says you should stretch more!" but then in the
| article, they just cite a specific study, I would still be
| slightly annoyed by that.
|
| It's just a nitpicky pet peeve that I think reveals some epic
| underlying truth about the cycle of human civilization (but
| probably doesn't)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There are good _theoretical_ arguments against this in the
| comments, but I wonder whether _in practice_ there have been
| occurrences where _ads_ were useful in challenging the scientific
| status-quo and advancing science?
|
| It seems like in practice, this policy is primarily designed to
| prevent stupid politicians that deny science to advance their
| agenda or maybe snake-oil vendors that use ads denying science to
| sell their shit. Both of those are a good thing to me.
| timcavel wrote:
| Only the Science Ministry is authorized to ordain official
| science through the USA Fact-Check Algorithm, the canonical
| arbiter of truth.
| qiskit wrote:
| > Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site
| who deny the scientific consensus on climate change, echoing a
| policy already in place at Google.
|
| Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't
| supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. And
| when you mix politics with science, you get social
| darwinism/scientific racism/etc.
|
| > Twitter said it would provide more information in the coming
| months on how it plans to provide "reliable, authoritative
| context to the climate conversations" its users engage in,
| including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The
| U.N.-backed science panel's reports on the causes and effects of
| climate change provide the basis for international negotiations
| to curb climate change.
|
| The good old authoritarian, I mean authoritative sources. It's
| amazing how the entire establishment political/media/tech/etc all
| rallied around "authoritative sources". It's almost like someone
| flipped a switch and it's become a national mantra.
| "Authoritative sources", "authoritative sources", "authoritative
| sources".
|
| A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all
| know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An
| institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France.
| Seems very trustworthy to me.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I remember when we progressives used to be _against_ the 3
| letter agencies and authority in general. Remember the 90 's?
| That's what classical liberals did.
|
| Current progressive movement is completely unhinged and looking
| more like CCP, sorry to say. It is going to backfire massively.
| [deleted]
| magicalist wrote:
| > _I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3
| letter agencies and authority in general._
|
| Neither the IPCC nor the UN are three letter agencies
| 8note wrote:
| The democratic institutions are broken, and the leaders are
| unwilling to put in fixes, and the electorate can't hold them
| to account without them
|
| Preserving voting rights, reducing gerrymandering, and
| limiting the filibuster to be an infrequent tool have no real
| priority.
|
| The old guard of bad 3 letter agencies have some insulation
| against that, making them the old evil instead of the new
| cryptica wrote:
| Of course it will backfire. Progressives these days have no
| real values aside from extracting as much money as possible
| from governments and citizens without providing any value in
| return. Once this strategy stops working, they will turn on
| each other. Their loyalty to each other is fake, just like
| everything else in their lives.
|
| Everything they say and do is founded on lies; that's why
| they depend so much on each other for support and
| reinforcement. It's a religion. The only way they can
| maintain their nonsensical ideologies is through repeated,
| mutual brainwashing.
| jmull wrote:
| > Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science
| isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on
| consensus.
|
| The ads are politics, not science.
|
| This is a case of twitter's political stance being at odds with
| some of their potential advertisers.
|
| I don't see why advertisers should have some right here that
| overrides twitter's.
|
| > authoritarian
|
| If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing
| twitter's right to do this.
| loceng wrote:
| > If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing
| twitter's right to do this.
|
| Indeed, so long as it isn't the government enforcing it on
| everyone, then the free market will come up with a competitor
| that will arguably start attracting those most aware of the
| importance of and aligned with freedom, freedom of speech -
| those people who arguably are on average much more highly
| competent and earning a higher income to be able to
| financially support a better model, and likewise bring their
| network(s) with them; I am working on launching such a
| competitor and believe I'm designing a platform model and
| launch/growth strategy that will work very well.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| No one's saying Twitter doesn't have the right to do this.
| They're saying it's a bad policy and Twitter should choose to
| allow content it disagrees with. Silencing others is not
| Liberty.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Except it's well within their rights to do this. They're
| not beholden to be the platform that furthers false things
| like climate change denial
| robertlagrant wrote:
| >> No one's saying Twitter doesn't have the right to do
| this.
|
| > Except it's well within their rights to do this.
|
| Swing and a miss.
| loceng wrote:
| That's a very difficult thing to moderate, to manage, and
| from personal experience Twitter doesn't even enforce
| their existing rules accurately.
|
| For example, will posts denying the hysteria of climate
| change - let's say the ideology of climate change
| activism that has formed, perhaps fuelled by for-profit
| industrial complexes, perhaps also leveraged by some
| governments wanting to use fear to manufacture consent
| toward control - be ban on Twitter, will that be
| considered denial if they point out things like some
| parts of the world actually cooling - and "heat deaths"
| in those areas are actually going down? Climate change
| hysteria media seems to only want to report the
| increasing heat deaths annually, but not deducting the
| reduced deaths from the cooling areas.
|
| Now I don't even know for 100% if the above is true, or
| how true it is, as I haven't had a chance to dive into
| some of the leaders of that effort who're supposedly
| trying to have a grounded, balanced conversation on
| climate - referencing data, etc.
|
| An organization or individual claiming they can be or are
| an arbiter of truth is a recipe for disaster; what New
| Zealand Prime Minister once actually said comes to mind,
| that if you hear something not from government (about
| COVID, the pandemic) then it's not true.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Actually, it's the opposite. Liberty is for individual
| freedom, not institutional freedom.
|
| I would back a small business's right to do this. Somewhere
| between there and twitter scale, the decision changes.
| gigatexal wrote:
| So you'd impose the small business or political groups
| rights to advertise on twitter (a larger corporation)?
| Where's the balance there?
| version_five wrote:
| This argument is so boring, it's the same every time.
|
| "They can build their own Twitter!"
|
| We have monopoly laws, they are not fundamentally at odds
| with liberty, they recognize that it's undesirable for
| society to have monopolies exercising market power. These
| need to be updated to reflect the current platform
| monopolies. Just like the phone company can't tell you
| what you can talk about on the phone, or railroads have
| to share their tracks under some conditions. Applying the
| same thing to Twitter and other bug tech platforms is a
| logical extension. The only difference is it would also
| involve the government/establishment giving up power
| gigatexal wrote:
| Nah. I don't buy it. Don't like Twitter? You have a few
| options:
|
| 1. Create a competitor. Network effects here are tough.
| Inertia is a thing. But perhaps those Twitter users with
| your sentiments will follow you to your new platform. See
| ya!
|
| 2. Buy up enough shares to put yourself on the board.
| This is akin to "write your congress person". Amounts to
| little.
|
| 3. Buy Twitter. Only folks crazy enough (see also Elon
| Musk) can do this. I say crazy because Twitter doesn't
| make decent money and is fine without him in my opinion.
| But ownership is a sure fire way to change things.
|
| Other options you could also pursue are:
|
| 4. Wax poetic on the internet about how since they're the
| only game in town they need to be open to taking money
| from anyone and everyone. They also need to allow all
| forms of speech. This also amounts to nothing.
|
| I guess a future Trump or DeSantis or Carlson or other Q
| affiliated presidency could along with a majority in
| congress force Twitter to do the things you're advocating
| for. I sure hope not.
|
| So yeah, if you build it they will come. So go build a
| competitor or join the myriad of others that operate in
| the extreme free speech/anything goes mantra. The rest of
| us will keep using Twitter and enjoying the relatively
| benign place it's become since Trump was banned.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| The outrage at one large corporation (Twitter) acting one
| way while implicitly defending other large corporations,
| e.g., Exxon-Mobil's propaganda-spreading-- seems a weird
| tightrope to walk. Not sure how large a problem small-
| business-climate-disinformation-spreading is.
| [deleted]
| achikin wrote:
| Twitter is not outraged for spreading a specific opinion
| but for muting the opposite side.
| [deleted]
| magicalist wrote:
| > _A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we
| all know about the UN, it 's that the UN isn't political. An
| institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France.
| Seems very trustworthy to me._
|
| A solid philosophy of science is difficult to live up to in the
| real world, but I guarantee that "I don't know anything about
| the IPCC but I see it's organized through the UN so I know
| enough to dismiss it" is not it.
| istinetz wrote:
| Why not? It seems obvious to me that a UN committee will be
| under a lot of political pressure to bend the truth, where it
| is in conflict with politics. And I have seen many, many
| examples of committees bending the truth. Why is this one
| different?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You're totally right. Any day now we're going to discover the
| secret to alchemy and then those folks in Flint will have
| faucets full of gold.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| To address your last sentence: yes, if you can get those five
| countries to agree on anything, it's probably trustworthy.
| bequanna wrote:
| If you can get those five countries to agree on anything, the
| lobbyists/politicians running those countries have found some
| way to benefit from that message.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| Unfortunately, two of those countries aren't allowed to vote
| so we don't know what they agree on.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Which two countries would those be?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Like voting changes much. Countries are all basically
| oligarchies, some of them have extra steps (a sprinkle of
| democracy, a pound of corruption) so people won't look up
| from their iPhone and feel superior to those backwards goat
| farmers with a dictator and no potable water.
|
| Still, I'm glad to see you enjoy seeing your 1/xxxM
| representation.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Science policy is different from science research, and
| similarly, medical policy is different from medical research.
| Policy is the intersection of technical craft and politics, and
| it ought be consensus-oriented.
|
| That doctors almost entirely practice consensus-based medicine
| does not mean that medical research is halted, but it does mean
| that not all clinics are labs, and thus medical research is not
| advancing at peak speed.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's exactly how you get people to buy statins for 50 years
| because the consensus is that cholesterol should be a certain
| number. Or covid vaccines for everyone x3. And I can't wait
| to see what taxes we'll need to raise to fight climate
| change.
|
| If science and profits wouldn't have a chance to mix in there
| would be value in a shared policy. In the real world, you'd
| better pay a good doctor for advice (enough to offset big
| pharma) and hope that policy being enforced by "the people's"
| government won't break your bank too much.
| staticassertion wrote:
| "science isn't supposed to work on consensus" lol yes, let's
| throw out the concept of peer review, all science is equal now
| everyone
| shoulderfake wrote:
| mlindner wrote:
| More often than not peer review acts as gatekeeping rather
| than actual analysis of the data and methods. The people who
| do peer review are often those with institutional political
| power rather than proper "peers".
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| This is such a bizarre take. Have you gone through the peer
| review process for a scientific paper? I have, and fairly
| reliably I've had experts in the field review the content
| and provide strong, thoughtful feedback. Maybe your
| particular subject field is more prone to politicking than
| mine? It's hard for me to think of peer review as anything
| other than absolutely essential.
| Kye wrote:
| Does it? Someone should do a study and...huh wait a minute.
|
| That's quite a claim to make, and impossible to falsify in
| the universe it posits.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science
| isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on
| consensus.
|
| This was Twitter, not Nature or ArXiv.
|
| This is sad, but good. It's sad that this is the least bad of
| two bad alternatives.
| cardy31 wrote:
| Yeah they rallied around it since the alternative is to just
| put everyone on an equal platform. Gatekeeping is good in areas
| like climate science where certain groups have a large
| incentive to spew demonstrably false information about it.
| _3u10 wrote:
| What group doesn't have a vested interest to spew
| demonstrably false information about it?
|
| Climate change isn't science it's mostly politics around
| preserving or not preserving the temperatures and sea levels
| from when the steam engine was invented.
|
| Like I believe the climate is changing, but we should do
| almost nothing about it. That said I don't own any property
| within 7 feet of sea level so I don't really give a shit if
| the people who do lose a little bit of their waterfront
| property.
| throwaway15908 wrote:
| Consider it like this.
|
| Sustainability is _only_ a waste management system that
| enables recycling rates of 90% or higher (which is damn
| hard). CO2 is also just one of many waste products, we
| totally dont care about, but _must_ to sustain our
| civilisation.
|
| No politics, just input/output, same goal.
| _3u10 wrote:
| The earth has had higher CO2 levels... and had much more
| biodiversity when it did. If anything for a sustainable
| world for life we should probably be targeting the 800ppm
| of the Carboniferous and not the 200ppm of the little ice
| age.
|
| Can you tell me why from a sustainability perspective why
| 200ppm is the ideal? Or if 200ppm is not the ideal what
| is the sustainable ideal, and why civilization collapses
| if we don't reach that target?
|
| I mean the totality of civilization not just that
| Buckingham palace or a few other places might be
| underwater? Like why can't we build ports a little inland
| from Amsterdam? Why can Paraguayans survive 40C but
| civilization collapses if Europe goes above 27C.
| throwaway15908 wrote:
| >Why are 200ppm sustainable?
|
| The higher CO2 levels of long gone times where probably
| not even remotely a problem for those critters around,
| because evolution had plenty of time to do its thing.
| Your whole point of "but what about back then" is
| comparing apples with oranges.
|
| Looking at the steep graph today, the increasing weather
| extremes and how brittle our supply chains are, i think
| its very appropriate to call it a climate catastrophe, we
| are heading for.
|
| Btw. I was using the ideal of perfect recycling and
| applied it to CO2, no absolute or relative ppm value is
| relevant for this.
| spidersouris wrote:
| > That said I don't own any property within 7 feet of sea
| level so I don't really give a shit if the people who do
| lose a little bit of their waterfront property.
|
| Are you implying that those who are the most concerned
| about climate change are wealthy people afraid to lose
| their possessions?
|
| How do you explain then that the wealthiest people, that is
| those possessing the greatest number of companies and
| contributing the most to climate change, are those that
| will do the least for climate change and will even fight to
| maintain the current economic model?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Excuse me? This is factually incorrect.
|
| Most wealthiest people, big tech, big business,
| mainstream media are all backing climate change.
| Politicians have been trying to get political support for
| years to pass new taxes for that. Recently Europe bundled
| a bunch of climate change funds together with covid
| recovery and postponed that 10 years in the future.
|
| Then, in terms of doing, I'm sure they will all find a
| way to make the middle class pay while the wealthiest pay
| zero like usual. And I'm also sure companies innovating
| will do way more to reverse co2 emissions and make
| renewables work than any western government will (China's
| dictatorship actually did some meaningful changes,
| especially in making solar cheaper; they must have been
| tired of pollution in the cities).
|
| I don't think it's wealthy owners of seaside properties
| who are causing all this climate alarmism, I think it's
| the usual politicians who would never let a good crisis
| go to waste.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Gatekeeping is not good, providing education and insight is
| good. If you gatekeep then you are essentially advocating for
| propaganda because that is how it will be used and has been
| used.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. When the
| experts on a topic don't have consensus, we say the science is
| undecided. When they have consensus, we call that science
| settled.
|
| And for the science to change under new evidence, again the
| consensus of experts is required, otherwise the new change
| remains on the fringe.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Kuhn and Popper may have something to say about that.
| modzu wrote:
| physics was settled by newton. any writing about those pesky
| quantum effects should have been banned
| User23 wrote:
| > Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts.
|
| This is scientistry, not science. Science works on
| observation and experiment. In a perfect world perhaps
| consensus would be established scientifically, but that's
| observably at odds with the history of science.
| jltsiren wrote:
| That's like saying that software engineering is about
| typing. Observations and experiments are low-level
| activities you perform while doing science. Actual science
| works on higher levels.
|
| Convincing yourself that your ideas are right is a low bar.
| The key part of doing science is convincing yourself that
| your ideas are wrong. It's about telling the difference
| between actually discovering something new and making
| mistakes in experiments and reasoning. If you fail to
| convince yourself, you ask others to convince you that your
| ideas are wrong. If they also fail, you are starting to
| build a consensus that maybe you have actually discovered
| something.
|
| Believing in something that contradicts the consensus is
| politics. Building a consensus among experts who are
| skeptical but open to new ideas is science.
| User23 wrote:
| Thanks for the clear demonstration that the use of
| analogy is no substitute for reason.
|
| The problem is one of confusion. There are at least three
| distinct things that we call science. Primus, the social
| enterprise itself. This is where "consensus" applies.
| Secundus, the method for understanding the rules
| governing the system of the world. This is where what you
| call "low level" activities are. Tertius, the body of
| accepted knowledge that's been ascertained.
| Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily follow from the
| scientific method. Sometimes it instead follows from the
| needs of the social enterprise of science, which we
| rather clumsily call politics.
|
| It's only by clearly and distinctly considering these
| three concepts that we can avoid frankly intellectually
| crippling confusion.
| [deleted]
| ssivark wrote:
| (Assuming the parent comment is normative/prescriptive rather
| than just descriptive) This is a dangerously wrong
| perspective. There are many beliefs that we consider
| laughably crazy today that were "settled" per the experts of
| the day.
|
| Remember "Eppur si muove"? It is impossible to establish who
| the "experts" are by the old truths -- we need the new truths
| for that.
|
| To channel Max Planck, scientific revolutions happen not
| publication to publication but funeral to funeral as old
| experts die and people grow up with new truths.
| timcavel wrote:
| ^^^ Someone deserves a full refund of their educational
| expenses. ^^^
| _3u10 wrote:
| Nah, when the science is settled it becomes a law. Like the
| Laws of Thermodynamics.
|
| Those things take hundreds of years. We don't even have a
| working model of climate change which is why they average out
| hundreds of them.
|
| The science on climate change is far from settled.
|
| It's pretty easy to take any given climate change model and
| watch it give inaccurate predictions.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Broadly speaking laws are a thing of the past.
|
| Also modelling basically anything is hard. Applying the
| laws of thermodynamics to a kettle well enough that you can
| predict it's exact dynamics is not a simple task.
| driverdan wrote:
| > when the science is settled it becomes a law
|
| That's not how it works for most of science. Most consensus
| ideas are theories because they are impossible to prove
| well enough to call them a law.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better myself. Climate change is an
| unproven theory, far from the certainty that the
| political side of science makes it out to be.
|
| For all intents and purposes until we have better
| modeling climate change is largely a political topic.
|
| People for the most part have a pet form of energy
| generation they want the world to switch to and use
| wildly inaccurate climate models to beat everyone who
| disagrees with them over the head with.
|
| See Germany and switching to oil and gas over climate
| friendly nuclear and trying to get gas added as a
| renewable form of energy and nuclear removed.
| Retric wrote:
| Laws aren't based on consensus or age as we have plenty of
| Laws that are known to be wrong and stuff gets called a law
| fairly early.
|
| F=MA fails really obviously at high velocity but the error
| doesn't go away at low speed it just becomes small enough
| to be ignored. Even the most known Law of conservation of
| energy fails in expanding space time.
|
| The basic rule of thumb is can you write a useful equation?
| And for climate change it's just too complex for that.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > ...when the science is settled it becomes a law.
|
| This is absolutely and completely wrong. "Hypothesis ->
| Theory -> Law" is not actually the scientific pipeline.
| Theories and laws not only can co-exist, but often do.
|
| From Wikipedia [0]:
|
| > Scientific theories explain why something happens,
| whereas scientific law describes what happens.
|
| An example of this is the theory of gravity [1], which
| contains laws of gravity [2].
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
|
| [1]: https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/ESSAYS/Bekenstein/
| bekens...
|
| [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_univer
| sal_gr...
| _3u10 wrote:
| Ok, Newtons law of gravity is settled science but also
| wrong.
|
| The "settled" science of climate change makes wildly
| inaccurate predictions on earth, during time periods we
| have lots of data on.
|
| Aren't we past the point of no return 8 times over now?
| dlivingston wrote:
| To your points:
|
| 1) Newton's Law of Gravity is not wrong, it is just
| incomplete. Newton's Law of Gravity is a critical formula
| used for calculating rocket trajectories and behaviors.
| It is correct but has 'boundaries' where Einstein's
| General Theory of Relativity takes over.
|
| 2) I'm not sure what this means.
|
| 3) I'm not sure what this means.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| This is my interpretation of his statement:
|
| 3)Dates for "Certain Doom", with regards to the climate,
| have been proffered by prognosticators of climate
| science. Much like those that predict the religious End
| Of Time, these dates invariably pass with no notice or
| fanfare.
| Retric wrote:
| That's a serious straw man argument. Where exactly do you
| see some "Certain Doom" prediction in say an IPCC report
| that's predicted something beyond X equivalent CO2
| results in Y temperature?
|
| The 2022 version for example basically says 1.5C above
| preindustrial levels by 2025.
|
| That's not some doom that's basically exactly where we
| are now and only relevant because the keep updating past
| predictions. Go back to reports from 1990 and 1.5C in
| 2025 is well within error bars. We are experiencing
| negative effects that could have been avoided in 1990,
| then again things could also have been worse before now
| without quite a lot effort into improving efficiency etc.
|
| Predictions further into the future assume continued net
| emissions continue and therefore the effects will be
| worse. That's not some "doom" that's cause and effect.
| 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C, and even 3C, as long as net emissions
| continue we well eventually reach all of those
| milestones.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Not OP and not a physicist.
|
| I think wrongness is inherent to any well-proven theory,
| because each theory is a model.
|
| It's just understanding where the theory falls apart and
| where it makes accurate and useful predictions.
|
| Like Newtonian physic. Even where it's accurate, the math
| can get hard for very simple scenarios.
|
| The classic three-body problem can be computed; but it's
| also inherently chaotic so any computation quickly
| becomes inaccurate (sensitive to initial values).
|
| I think they compute many different times with different
| initial conditions, to generate probabilities.
|
| I imagine the climate science of "what happens" is also
| the same: We may not turn into Venus, but we also know
| all that excess heat and energy has to go somewhere and
| in our fragile global supply chain it won't take much to
| make a disaster.
|
| Still, I don't like the quasi-religious aura that climate
| journalism has. It's very off-puttingz
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Choose your experts carefully.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Labotomies won the Nobel prize supported by the consensus.
|
| Heliocentric theory and antiseptic theory was scoffed at by
| the mainstream.
|
| Consensus is merely a guide, there's no such thing as settled
| science.
|
| The reason is, we're studying an infinite universe with the
| limited technology and when that technology or that current
| mode of understanding changes, our entire understanding of
| the univ. changes.
| djbebs wrote:
| No it doesn't. Consensus is at best irrelevant to science,
| and if anything it's harmful because it reduces the search
| space for the truth.
| kirykl wrote:
| Science works on empirical evidence. Consensus perhaps is
| important in testing that evidence is repeatable and true.
| But the basis is evidence.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| No, science works on _skepticism_.
| nlitened wrote:
| How can the consensus ever change if we deplatform, defund,
| and ostracize all scientists (or would-be scientists)
| researching and publishing any evidence that contradicts
| consensus?
| pfdietz wrote:
| By presenting good evidence that the consensus is wrong,
| and then after the existing model is thrown into doubt,
| presenting a better model. But there actually has to be
| that evidence. Bogus evidence (such as that presented by
| global warming deniers) does not suffice.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| This is a fair argument but it seems like the proportion of
| climate deniers who are driven by bad faith massively
| outweight climate skeptics acting in good faith.
| notatoad wrote:
| that's how dissent in science has always been treated,
| going back to things like "the earth is round". i'm not
| saying it's the best system, but it's not new.
| historically, science gets it right in the end, but
| shifting the scientific consensus is a long and slow
| process that happens among scientists, not something that
| uninformed masses contribute to in any meaningful way. the
| barrier to getting widespread acceptance of your dissenting
| theory is much higher than for getting widespread
| acceptance of your theory that matches the status quo.
|
| i don't think it's obvious that there's a benefit to making
| it easier to promote ideas that contradict the generally
| accepted science. if it's correct, smart people will
| eventually be convinced of that. promoting fringe theories
| on twitter amongst people who have no underlying knowledge
| of the subject matter won't do anything to advance the most
| correct ideas, only the loudest ideas or the ideas that
| most match our pre-existing biases.
| mach1ne wrote:
| > if it's correct, smart people will eventually be
| convinced of that.
|
| That's not how science has historically worked. Smart
| people won't be convinced, new people will. Status quo
| changes when the previous generation is laid to rest.
|
| This is the result of the academia being just another
| human social system obeying the same laws of power as all
| the rest, thus inheriting all their flaws.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Science has often worked like that. As an example
| consider Galileo's discovery of the phases of Venus. It
| immediately destroyed the Ptolemaic model of the solar
| system. Even supporters of that system overwhelmingly
| immediately abandoned it.
| mannykannot wrote:
| There are plenty of cases where things have moved much
| faster than that - e.g. the adoption of QM and
| relativity, dark energy becoming a respectable
| hypothesis, plate tectonics, dinosaur extinction via
| impact... In each of these cases, either new evidence or
| a new explanation for previously-puzzling evidence was
| key.
| monort wrote:
| It took 50 years for plate tectonics: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#History_of_the...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > if we deplatform, defund, and ostracize all scientists
| (or would-be scientists) researching and publishing any
| evidence that contradicts consensus
|
| Because the announced policy is none of those things?
| wtallis wrote:
| Twitter is already pretty much the worst possible
| communication medium for engaging in scientific debate.
| Challenging scientific consensus in a way that is credible
| and easily distinguished from trolling or corporate PR
| requires a more in-depth discussion of facts and
| explanations than Twitter is designed to facilitate.
| Certhas wrote:
| This is risible. Next we'll cry a tear for all the good
| scientists who can not get heard with their findings that
| Tobacco is harmless after all?
|
| There has been concerted funding and propaganda _against_
| the science by an industry that is literally earning
| billions a week.
|
| Others have already pointed out that it's always been hard
| to go against the consensus in science. It's supposed to be
| hard. The consensus became the consensus for a reason.
| Overthrowing it is a monumental effort that gets you into
| the history books.
|
| This is not what this is about and this is not what is
| going on here though. In the 80s serious scientists debated
| man made global warming. They raised objections, and
| contradicted the models. Eventually all the reasonable and
| important objections were addressed. The debate settled.
| The evidence came in. We now have 30 years of observational
| data on top of that!
|
| And _now_ people complain that there is no scientific
| debate! No one was paying attention when the debate
| happened! That's why you are getting the conclusion! That's
| why people who object are told "Yeah we covered this, check
| the papers." Which doesn't feel like debate but in reality
| just shows that the person coming in hasn't done their due
| diligence or isn't arguing in good faith.
| [deleted]
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >Next we'll cry a tear for all the good scientists who
| can not get heard with their findings that Tobacco is
| harmless after all?
|
| Don't forget that the consensus used to be that tobacco
| was harmless. The consensus can change from an incorrect
| position to the correct one.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Don't forget that the consensus used to be that tobacco
| was harmless
|
| No? Tobacco companies themselves knew tobacco wasn't
| harmless. Just like oil companies have known for almost a
| century that humans were causing drastic climate change
| due to CO2.
| devindotcom wrote:
| I think you'll find that as soon as researchers began
| looking into the harmful effects of smoking, the link to
| cancer quickly became the scientific consensus. It did
| not become the popular consensus for decades because of
| the indefatigable opposition campaign funded by the
| tobacco companies.
|
| A good history of all this is here:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22345227/
|
| Imagine if a company had prohibited tobacco advertising
| that asserted smoking was healthy. That's the parallel
| here.
| wslack wrote:
| That isn't what Twitter is banning. There are plenty of
| academics working to refine our knowledge around the
| climate. Conservatives who have dug into the full science
| have concluded that the consensus today has merit.
|
| This is knowable.
|
| It's like the difference between someone researching the
| exact strength of antibiotics and claiming that medicine
| doesn't work. One of those isn't science.
| azornathogron wrote:
| Even without any of the more modern forms of deplatforming,
| defunding or ostracization, people have been concerned for
| at least several decades about an inability for new ideas
| to make inroads and change overall scientific consensus or
| understanding.
|
| I am speaking of the idea often described as "science
| progresses one funeral at a time" - which Wikipedia informs
| me is sometimes known as "Planck's principle"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
| enkid wrote:
| How does allowing people to advertise on Twitter make
| that process better? I don't see it.
| azornathogron wrote:
| It doesn't, and I was not claiming anything like that. In
| fact I wasn't making any claim about anything at all. I
| was just pointing out some broader context that the way
| ideas spread and consensus forms or changes is a messy
| and human process and always has been, and that it's
| something people have been thinking about for a long time
| already, so there are plenty of ideas to read about the
| topic for anyone who is interested in it.
|
| If you do want a claim, my personal opinion is that
| Twitter's choices to ban or allow certain advertising
| will make no noticeable difference to the progress of
| scientific understanding, because I don't think adverts
| on Twitter are a communication channel that matters for
| the spread of ideas within academic communities. I can
| imagine that over time it might make a difference to lay-
| people's beliefs about some things, although I'm not sure
| whether Twitter has a broad enough audience to really
| change much here. Since I personally am fully onboard the
| "climate change is real, and it's real bad" train, I
| don't have any problem with Twitter banning adverts that
| spread the opposite idea. If it was a ban on what general
| Twitter users can post then I would have a problem with
| it, but I'm ok with a ban on adverts. Maybe that's
| inconsistent of me, I don't know.
| jcranberry wrote:
| By publishing their science in academic journals rather
| than twitter.
| beached_whale wrote:
| This is it. The conclusions should match the weight of
| the evidence being written about, and that of existing
| papers. This can be seen with semi-recent FTL neutrino
| experiment... it was probably a faulty cable. There are
| often many reasons for counter evidence that explain it
| better than changing the current understandings. That has
| to be worked through first, and isn't a headline grabbing
| process.
| istinetz wrote:
| Hypothetically: a study finds racial differences in
| intelligence, or something equally taboo.
|
| Do you _really_ believe an esteemed journal would
| actually publish it? Or would they find a reason to
| politely decline, such as "it's out of scope", "didn't
| pass peer review", "doesn't align with out values,
| reword"?
|
| Do you believe, even if the study is published, that it
| would not destroy someone's career?
|
| And finally, if researchers believe there is a chance of
| that happening, would they actually start to investigate
| the taboo area?
|
| My answer to all these questions is "no". This is why
| when you say, "just publish in academic journals", I am
| highly skeptical. And why I am annoyed at yet another
| example of the social media oligarchy enforcing what
| ideas are allowed to propagate.
| sadris wrote:
| Behold, exactly what you are talking about:
| https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/positively-motivated-
| to-he...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Emil Kirkegaard? That's your example? Did you dig that
| out not knowing who he is, or did you post it with full
| knowledge of who he was, hoping HNers wouldn't actually
| look at who he is?
|
| For those who aren't aware:
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
|
| > Emil Ole William Kirkegaard is a Danish far-right
| eugenicist, perjurer[3] and activist for legalising child
| pornography. He has a wide range of crank views and is a
| global-warming denier, anti-feminist, ableist, anti-
| vegan, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe and has
| promoted white supremacy. He is most notorious and
| obnoxious online for his ableism and calling transgender
| people, liberals, feminists and pretty much anyone with
| left-wing political views who merely disagrees with him
| as "mentally ill".
|
| > Aside from his controversial writings on eugenics and
| race, Kirkegaard has been involved in other activities
| such as publishing personal data of 70,000 OKCupid users
| without permission, including their sexual
| preferences,[10] considered by Vox to be "without a doubt
| one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and
| reprehensible data releases".[11] His writings on race
| and intelligence[12] have caused controversy and because
| peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish his work, he set
| up the OpenPsych pseudojournals.[13] However, after this
| journal was discredited he now publishes pseudo-
| scientific race articles in the open-access Psych
| journal.[14][15]
|
| [...]
|
| > His highest qualification is a Bachelor's in
| linguistics. Having dropped out of his Masters degree,
| instead preferring to be "self-taught in various
| subjects"
|
| [...]
|
| > Kirkegaard's own personal blog is home to topics such
| as "Is miscegenation bad for your kids?" and how one
| could empirically verify a Jewish conspiracy
| istinetz wrote:
| I read the entire rationalwiki page on him, and followed
| the links to the primary sources, and I learned the
| following:
|
| a) whoever wrote the wiki _really_ doesn 't like him. A
| lot of the claims about him are a stretch.
|
| b) he does make some good points
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 1) Ad hominem; even if it were an accurate claim, it
| would also be an irrelevant one.
|
| 2) You're broadly dismissing factual statements as
| "claims" with no supporting evidence. Given the
| statements on RW are backed extensively by citations,
| please support "a lot of claims about him are a stretch"
| with citations of your own.
|
| 3) I take it your "hypothetical" example about race and
| intelligence isn't actually hypothetical but something
| you actually believe?
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Do you really believe an esteemed journal would
| actually publish it?_
|
| You seem to be forwarding an idea of an information
| ecosystem where what is an "esteemed" journal is static.
| Like you cannot imagine Nature being anything but the top
| journal - so Nature _must_ publish works they find
| suspect because otherwise nothing will change.
|
| Frankly, that's not how anything works. Groups of people
| organize around beliefs and there is a relatively stable
| (but shifting) understanding of the prestige of those
| organizations. Look at, for instance, the understanding
| around the stonewall riot / protest (depending on who is
| describing it). If these heterodox views are correct (and
| for the record I think the race 'science' that claims to
| show non-white people consistently test below white folks
| is obviously and embarrassingly wrong. I encourage you to
| check out this critique of the bell curve[1]) then they
| will, over time, become more and more accepted and their
| articles in "alternative" journals will be key in that
| process.
|
| The way that previously alternative views have come to
| the center is that they were published in their own
| "fringe" publications for years - and then, over time, as
| those view were more and more accepted, the papers start
| appearing in 'mainstream' publications. The "years in the
| wilderness" is a feature not a bug! You have to let
| subaltern movements develop their own ideas and voice
| outside of the mainstream to see if they really have a
| substantial critique of the mainstream - because
| inevitably any real critique involves getting the
| mainstream to let go of one or more central axiom of
| their worldview.
|
| If you are serious about supporting these ideas (and I
| really hope you are using 'race science' as an attention
| grabbing flash point rather than a thing you believe),
| you really should start talking about them like you're
| aware of the history of how previously controversial
| ideas become mainstream.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
| istinetz wrote:
| half your comment is spent debunking my "claim". You
| cannot even discuss discussing taboo ideas.
|
| >The "years in the wilderness" is a feature not a bug!
|
| You just invented that. Never have I heard a suggestion
| that for a new theory to become mainstream, you must
| first create a new fringe journal that can exceed the
| existing journals in reputation.
|
| In fact, I can think of several examples of brand new
| findings that upended the mainstream that were published
| directly in Nature or Science.
|
| You literally just invented this entire process just to
| give a reason why politically taboo ideas are
| unpublishable.
| staticassertion wrote:
| This is a silly hypothetical for a number of reasons.
|
| 1. There are a million reasons it could be rejected. For
| one thing, we have decades if not centuries of _terrible_
| science here, motivated by even worse agendas. A journal
| is going to be extremely skeptical of any study in this
| area for that same reason, and they would be for anything
| much less controversial that had centuries of garbage
| behind it.
|
| 2. Science is not morally exempt. A journal may ask
| themselves if the scientific implications of this paper
| are worth the practical implications of supporting the
| work _at that stage_ - that 's going to depend a LOT on
| the paper itself, and since this is a hypothetical, we
| have no way of discussing this point.
|
| > Do you believe, even if the study is published, that it
| would not destroy someone's career?
|
| I don't know, maybe? Again, it's a hypothetical. What is
| this paper showing? Who is it by? There's so much context
| missing here. I'd certainly think whoever did this
| research, with no other context, is _probably_ an idiot,
| but I could be convinced otherwise.
|
| > And finally, if researchers believe there is a chance
| of that happening, would they actually start to
| investigate the taboo area?
|
| Maybe? Like, yeah, _good point_ , I would definitely
| question the motives of anyone doing this research. But
| _this is a hypothetical so it 's impossible to say_.
|
| > My answer to all these questions is "no".
|
| Given this extremely broad hypothetical it seems pretty
| absurd to answer any way definitively.
|
| Regardless, this in no way supports the idea that the
| research rejected by journals is somehow fit for _Twitter
| ads_. It is, at best, a criticism of journals, without
| any comment on what the right solution would be.
|
| The idea that _advertising on Twitter_ is somehow the
| bandaid we need for purported issues with scientific peer
| review is absolutely fucking laughable and I think people
| on HN should seriously question the competency of the
| average user here.
| pcl wrote:
| Rather than twitter _ads_ , in the case at hand.
| staticassertion wrote:
| They can submit their papers to journals for review. No one
| is stopping them. Twitter is not the place for that.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Do you think it changes with political ads on social media?
| I think this is completely decoupled from the science
| itself. Luckily.
| owisd wrote:
| How can the consensus change if only the side that can
| afford the most twitter ads get to put their position
| forward?
| rhino369 wrote:
| Allowing one side to advertise doesn't mean the other
| side doesn't get to "put their position forward."
| owisd wrote:
| If, as you say, not advertising on twitter doesn't mean
| you don't get to put your position forward then nothing
| of value is being lost by the twitter policy change.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I'm saying that allowing A to advertise on twitter
| doesn't prevent B from advertising on twitter.
| owisd wrote:
| If one side has a financial incentive to push bad faith
| arguments, whereas the other side has no financial
| incentive or resources and is just interested in science
| for the sake of science, then by supporting having the
| debate via twitter ads you've created a system that locks
| out one side.
| enkid wrote:
| Advertising on Twitter should not be the way people try to
| change the consensus.
| mlindner wrote:
| > Science works on consensus
|
| No it doesn't. I can't believe people are even claiming this.
| Science has NOTHING to do with consensus. If evidence is
| produced that goes against a consensus then the consensus is
| wrong. Consensus has nothing to do with science. Consensus is
| a problem of humans that disrupts the scientific process.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Worth remembering the scientific method relies on some
| sense of repeatable phenomena for idealized "experiment".
| Social science, medicine, astronomy, geology, earth
| science, each have their own axioms for what that means.
| (E.g., assume the universe is isotropic).
|
| I don't think each of these are as solid as the other.
| Climate science is certainly less testable than say
| particle physics. Not that we shouldn't work together as
| humans to model, understand and keep our (only) planet
| stable as best we can.. but "scientific consensus" is less
| meaningful in this field.. used as a political word to
| motivate people at the expense of more nuanced
| understanding.
|
| But like vaccines, it's probably better to act now before
| we understand it all.. (on the day before we go extinct).
| alexashka wrote:
| > Consensus is a problem of humans that disrupts the
| scientific process
|
| No, no, consensus is the only reason we _have_ science, or
| language, or much of anything humans find interesting. Let
| me explain:
|
| Science is a thing humans do. Without humans around, I
| don't see ants doing science anytime soon :) When humans
| share the stuff they do and reach agreement, that is called
| consensus.
|
| In other words, any word you use, it is because humans
| wanted to communicate and reach consensus, so they invented
| a word for it.
|
| So you have it backwards, it's humans -> consensus ->
| science, not science -> consensus -> humans.
| mithr wrote:
| > If evidence is produced that goes against a consensus
| then the consensus is wrong
|
| To be more specific, then the consensus _may_ be wrong. The
| bar to demonstrate that something is wrong _and be taken
| seriously_ is meant to be higher than simply claiming one
| can produce evidence to the contrary.
|
| When such evidence is discovered, the idea is that one
| would present that evidence to peers, who would attempt to
| replicate the findings, and support them if they are able
| to do so, or otherwise publish their counter-findings in
| response. This is obviously more complicated in practice
| because we're dealing with humans and not ideals (and thus
| we have things like the replication crisis), but that is
| the theory of how we advance the body of knowledge that we
| derive from scientific theses and experiments.
|
| We do not advance it by claiming that evidence has been
| found and then leaving it at that, in a vacuum. So it's not
| _exactly_ that science "works on consensus", in the sense
| that _just_ a majority doesn 't prove anything, but --
| convincing, using evidence, the majority of the scientific
| community in your field, is certainly part of the process.
| belorn wrote:
| Let say someone want to advertise natural gas as an green
| energy source. What is the consensus among climate researcher
| on that, and what does EU politicians consensus say? Which
| authoritative sources should we pick here?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Scientists are not publishing ads on Twitter for their theories.
| Corporations are.
|
| What people are defending is corporate consensus, because
| ultimately that's who puts up ads that contradict the current
| research around climate change. Corporations have reached a
| generalized consensus that climate change isn't a problem to
| worry about right now, because to accept the opposite means
| change that would affect their business and profits.
|
| These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes
| scientific consensus can be artificially created through the use
| of corporate backers; but a little bit of logical deduction in
| this scenario should make it obvious that the people with the
| largest profit incentives are those that have a vested interest
| in claiming climate change isn't an issue.
|
| That said, people arguing that scientific consensus doesn't exist
| is remarkably ignorant. It should take time and effort for any
| theory you publish to make its way to the forefront because
| otherwise you end up with a flood of charlatans, corporations and
| otherwise submitting bunk science in order to further their own
| profit or political motives.
| politician wrote:
| Twitter needs to stop or be stopped. Censorship belongs to the
| government, not private institutions. Let the government pass
| legislation instructing Twitter about which speech is allowed.
| The government, at least in the US, is accountable to the people,
| but Twitter like other authoritarian regimes is accountable only
| to themselves.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| So you want a more authoritarian government to clamp down on
| what businesses can and cannot do? Seems contrary to the
| freedom everyone on this website seems to be enamoured with.
| I'd expect private enterprises (emphasis on the word private)
| to be able to do just about whatever they want with their
| businesses in a "free" system.
| 8note wrote:
| So far, all laws around censorship are that it is up to private
| individuals which ideas they want to promote, and which ones
| they don't.
|
| Antitrust is a much better direction to tackle this kind of
| issue through. Twitter needs to be one way of seeing the
| underlying data, rather than having a monopoly on it.
| mdavis6890 wrote:
| Blood letting was the scientific consensus not long ago. You
| would have been spreading misinformation to question it.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Well just yesterday there was a story about how donating blood
| helps remove microplastics so...
| wtallis wrote:
| Bloodletting and the practice of medicine as a whole both
| predate organized science. Transforming medicine into a
| scientific discipline is an incomplete work in progress, and
| discarding bloodletting is one of the consequences of that
| transition.
| olivermarks wrote:
| "science' in this context is essentially a form of religious
| dogma.
|
| Who is twitter to say that science is settled, done and dusted?
| This is just the latest version of torturing people considered
| heretics to force them to recant their views and is antithetical
| to western liberal concepts of free speech, discussion and
| evolution of ideas
|
| https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/02/26/Galileo-the-gifted-1....
| akomtu wrote:
| Scientism as the new religion. This gradual shift from the
| feeling-based dogmas to dogmas based on shallow knowledge is,
| in fact, a sign of progress, that the majority of the populace
| starts putting knowledge before feelings.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| What's weird is that until COVID, scientism was on the way
| out of favor, with the sidelining of the New Atheists (Tyson,
| Hitchens, et al). It's funny how the movement managed to get
| revived just before it stepped through the pearly gates, as
| it were.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Sadly much of what passes for 'science' these days is
| actually slanted persuasion, feeling/fear manipulation and
| cancel culture
| staticassertion wrote:
| This is good news. Misinformation is cheap to produce and
| expensive to combat once it's out there. My opinion is that the
| only effective approach is to deplatform it entirely, as early in
| the process as possible.
| dominotw wrote:
| >Misinformation
|
| thats not what this is about.
| staticassertion wrote:
| It very obviously is. They're rejecting advertisers who
| project misinformation around climate change.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Actually it seems like it's explicitly about misinformation
| promoted by those with an interest in denying the realities
| of climate change.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good. This is twitter doing what it should in the public good.
| meatsauce wrote:
| Stalin said the holodomor was for the public good, too.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Pretty soon I could see the US saying sending Russian
| Americans to camps is good and the left celebrating it.
| gigatexal wrote:
| You folks seem to love the slippery slope argument. There's
| clearly a difference between facts and fiction. Not
| allowing clearly and proven false advertising on the
| platform elevates that advertising and makes it even more
| valuable. At least to me. And makes me want to use the
| platform even more thereby increasing engagement and then
| driving up ad value and prices.
|
| Advertising honesty != a forced famine nor is it forcing
| Russian Americans into camps like we did to Japanese
| citizen in WW2.
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| This is an absolutely absurd thing to say and is about half a
| degree away from reductio ad Hitlerum. We're talking about
| misleading advertisements here, try to stay grounded when you
| think about these things.
| vixen99 wrote:
| You're just yea-saying. Who defines public good? You and
| Twitter whoever they are behind the scenes? Clearly there are
| matters of which we should know nothing. And folk like you will
| protect us.
| gigatexal wrote:
| If we stay within scope of the action taken here we can
| clearly see that this is Twitter enforcing some truth in its
| advertising. Now if it would just ban crypto ads ... but I'm
| not head of advertising at Twitter so it won't happen.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Also this is the actions of a company. Not a government. A
| company seeking to limit who or what to advertise. That's
| gotta tick a few right of center (politically) boxes no?
| kvetching wrote:
| [deleted]
| tsol wrote:
| I wonder if this has anything to do with Elon Musk saying he
| wants to buy Twitter and change it for the public good
| kvetching wrote:
| chernevik wrote:
| "Contradicting science" is exactly how you do science.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Yeah, but then you publish your theory (along with supporting
| evidence!) in academic publications. Who ever heard of a
| scientist taking out Twitter ads to push their fringe theory
| directly to ordinary people?
| endominus wrote:
| Efforts to ban "misinformation" are gaining ground pretty
| much everywhere, with full-throated support by government
| institutions and at most given token resistance from social
| media companies, if that. Banning misinformation or heterodox
| opinions in ads is the initial step; does anyone, in good
| faith, truly believe that's where it will stop? Facebook and
| YouTube already warn about videos that mention certain
| topics, hence some YouTubers saying phrases like "Hope you're
| staying healthy in these trying times" in case the platform
| deranked them for saying COVID. Soon, as the ability for
| algorithms to understand context evolves, discussion and
| especially disagreement of such things at all will be heavily
| censored (I'm sorry, "downranked") by algorithms on such
| sites, until they are essentially invisible.
|
| Also, it's not just about publishing papers. Scientists use
| Twitter to network and communicate their ideas with other
| scientists. To learn about what people are working on,
| interesting ideas in their field, and so on. If heterodoxy is
| banned from discussion, it becomes that much harder to
| challenge existing consensus, because they will be unable to
| communicate effectively with one another on public platforms.
| wtallis wrote:
| > does anyone, in good faith, truly believe that's where it
| will stop?
|
| If you see the actions of Twitter, _et al._ as stemming not
| from a desire to flex power over society but merely as a
| desire to not be exposed to claims that they 're profiting
| directly from and complicit in harmful disinformation
| campaigns, then it is reasonable to expect that they won't
| go too much further.
|
| They've certainly dragged their heels thus far. They're
| clearly trying to put the minimum moderation effort to
| avoid getting hit by more serious public outcry or
| government interference, which naturally gives rise to a
| very error-prone moderation scheme.
| endominus wrote:
| >If you see the actions of Twitter, et al. as stemming
| not from a desire to flex power over society
|
| Except I don't see that as being the source at all. Like
| I said, the support for these initiatives originates in
| government. Hence the government making much of their
| intent to further legislate and examine the operating
| models, algorithms, and moderation of these companies.
| Twitter, Alphabet, Facebook, etc are all acting
| defensively in response to these pressures, but in the
| process there's very little appetite to defend free
| speech proper (even the ACLU, I am given to understand,
| is not the same organization that at one time defended
| the KKK's right to march in the streets - although I
| can't remember too much of the noise around their
| supposed change in direction). The ratchet only ever goes
| one way.
|
| Other companies are already modifying what discussion is
| allowed or disfavored on their platforms, as I noted in
| my post. They can see the headwinds clearly. As more
| governments discover the power of controlling the
| narrative, it will only be natural for them to apply
| pressure to companies that have the greatest power to
| modify that narrative. Institutions follow incentives
| just like every other agentic thing. They have an
| incentive to defend themselves and accumulate power, and
| so it is often useful to model them as (usually) taking
| actions that help them do that.
|
| Note that I'm not saying that the President is going to
| call the CEO of Twitter and tell him, "Stop this whole
| 'Let's go Brandon!' thing." That's not really how it
| works. To paraphrase the editor of the NYT (iirc), "I've
| never had to kill a story my journalists wrote for
| political reasons." And neither, probably, did the
| editors of Pravda. Once you get to a certain level of
| awareness, and it's hard to believe the C-suite of these
| large tech companies lacking that, you have to be able to
| read the room, politically speaking, and know what the
| actual big players - the people with the real power -
| want out of you. Subtle alterations of reported reality
| is going to be the new normal. "What you're hearing and
| seeing isn't really what's going on" - a bit more
| terrifying to realize that that's the capability that's
| slowly becoming normalized.
| wtallis wrote:
| So your claim is that nobody can honestly believe that
| social media companies would show increased opposition to
| increasing government pressure, and that it's obvious
| that the companies are willing to follow the governments
| all the way to totalitarianism--in spite of the
| resistance and reticence the companies have already
| shown? You _really_ think it 's that unreasonable to view
| this as a shifting of the equilibrium rather than an
| unchecked runaway process?
| endominus wrote:
| More or less, yes. I don't believe that these companies
| have actual principles to defend here; they act in self-
| preservation. If the government threatens to break up
| Google for spreading propaganda, it's going to stop
| spreading propaganda, however the government defines the
| category. PRISM wasn't that long ago. Gag orders exist.
| Do you think Fastmail is going to refuse to comply with
| the Assistance and Access Bill? To view this as a
| shifting equilibrium, I would need to see organizations
| arising as dedicated to opposing this process as there
| are those seeking to accelerate it. I don't believe they
| exist at the scale necessary to do so. Instead, I see a
| meme gaining ground that free speech itself is
| unnecessary or harmful - "freeze peach" at the mud-
| slinging lower end of the intellectual scale, and "the
| Paradox of Tolerance" at the higher end.
| PolygonSheep wrote:
| > then it is reasonable to expect that they won't go too
| much further.
|
| Is it reasonable to expect that whatever social/political
| forces have pushed them to do this will stop there?
|
| It makes no difference really if Twitter is out in front
| leading this or being dragged along kicking and screaming
| against their will. Is there reason to think "okay you
| can all stop worrying it's definitely stopped here and
| won't go any further"?
| stonogo wrote:
| Scientists use Twitter to get eyes on their papers, talks,
| and posters. No scientist's work would be meaningfully
| impacted by the dissolution of Twitter. We had conferences
| and journals before the web, and we'll have them long after
| whatever big tech darling of the moment is gone.
| 8note wrote:
| how many scientists buy ads through twitter to network with
| other scientists? Is money spent the right networking
| mechanism?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Are adverts scientific research now?
| TedShiller wrote:
| Let me point out that science has been wrong many times before
| tzs wrote:
| How many of those times was the error corrected via ads in
| popular media?
| cryptica wrote:
| There is no such thing as 'contradicting science' - Science is
| never settled, never certain. If it was, it would be called
| Mathematics.
| timcavel wrote:
| Thought-crime alert! Science Ministry Rule 186 violation, do
| not question the science without a registered science license
| identifier attached.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| A step in the right direction towards banning all untruthful ads!
|
| But wait, since advertising is almost exclusively lies, then
| Twitter might ban all ads! That would be great! Elon would have
| to finance all Twitter operations out of pocket, but he can
| afford it, it's a drop in the bucket for the world's richest, and
| therefore smartest, man!
| mirceal wrote:
| Elon is gonna save them. all ads will be welcome!
| npunt wrote:
| It seems a lot of people are responding to this from the
| 'allowable speech' and 'consensus is bad' perspective, which
| triggers the inevitable 'its a private platform' or 'its just one
| place' response.
|
| We should be looking at this from a threat model perspective.
| That certain subjects, at certain times, are subject to
| coordinated threats in order to gain power to those coordinating
| them. This isn't about 'scientific consensus', this is a known
| set of threat actors following a known playbook to spread FUD,
| 'flood the zone with shit', etc, for known reasons.
|
| Any human effort at scale is going to be subject to some amount
| of threat noise trying to get in the way of signal. We overcome
| these with institutional antibodies, things like practices and
| protocols and checks and balances (hopefully made transparent).
| We try to lower the noise floor so that the quality stuff is
| encouraged and sticks around.
|
| I feel like a lot of complaints fall back to unrealistic idealism
| because they don't have the insight on what the decision making
| apparatus is, where it is empowered and where it is limited, and
| how decisions were reached. That's a problem, but arguing that
| threats shouldn't be addressed is not the solution, because _we
| already know how that plays out in institutions, communities, and
| societies_. They fall apart.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I believe that CC is a problem that I am 100% behind but how do
| we avoid this piggy backing and hijacking of CC initiatives to
| further _some other_ agenda? Say increase profit margins or green
| wash people? Just recently I stayed in a Marriott hotel and my
| entire experience was marred with CC warning labels everywhere
| from Toiletteries to free breakfast in the morning. You know what
| would be better for CC? That hotel to not exist in the first
| place. There is no end in sight and no limit to what can be done
| for CC. So you have this unlimited power from random authorities
| masquerading behind CC.
|
| I think the problem with Climate Change movement is sort of like
| COVID. Restroom closed? Because COVID. Public Park Trail closed?
| COVID. Wtf!?
|
| No one challenges it. No is allowed to. It has all these side
| effects.
|
| We ought to double-down where things _actually_ matter for the
| betterment of the planet and speak up against this other non-
| sense.
| chmod600 wrote:
| It's a bandwagon thing. Founders and early joiners of a
| movement are very different from people who join after a
| movement is already successful/catching on (perhaps widely or
| perhaps in one area/subculture).
|
| After something becomes so successful that you can't challenge
| it in any way (at least in some circles) it takes on the
| characteristics you describe. If someone pokes you in the eye
| and says it's for climate change, you can't say anything.
|
| None of this has to do with the accuracy of the original
| movement. CC can be very real and abused by politicians and
| other opportunists.
| seoaeu wrote:
| It doesn't seem that hard to differentiate "Marriott is washing
| towels less often to save money, not because they care about
| saving water" from someone claiming that climate change isn't
| happening...
| CreateAccntAgn wrote:
| Scientific consensus on climate change is pretty well defined. Is
| anyone saying that messages that contradict them are correct
| sometimes and so Twitter is wrong in this action? Corps have been
| abusing capital to amplify their speech intentionally misleading
| public on this subject regardless of its harm. This imho is the
| right move.
| UberFly wrote:
| What about Corps abusing capital to muffle speech? This isn't
| necessarily just about climate change.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| "Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site who
| deny the scientific consensus on climate change"
|
| Does that mean if an advertisers sais the wrong thing elsewhere
| in public they will be banned?
| yes_really wrote:
| I have a feeling that "contradict science on climate change" will
| only go one way. For example, economists agree that effects of
| climate change would be very small (compared to the world's
| economy) or even positive. David Friedman even thinks that
| climate change might be a *net positive* for the economy [1][2].
| Is Twitter going to ban ads that say climate change will be a
| catastrophe?
|
| [1]
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/09/david_friedman_9.ht...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euL39f1kins
| npunt wrote:
| Macroeconomics really strains the definition of 'science'. Few
| economists would place their field's predictive or descriptive
| power anywhere near that of chemistry, physics, biology, and
| all the other hard sciences that are part of climate science
| and the analysis of its effects. And I haven't yet seen people
| in the fact checking / 'allowable speech' sphere bring up most
| any social sciences as being settled or beyond reproach enough
| to take down content.
|
| Given that there are so many unknowns about the extent of the
| nth-order effects of climate change (e.g. ecosystem collapse),
| I find it laughable that economists have a macro model that has
| any level of certainty to it. They can't even get relatively
| static situations correct, let alone literally world-changing
| ones.
| markdown wrote:
| > David Friedman even thinks that climate change might be a
| _net positive_ for the economy
|
| Which economy? Certainly not the ones that are getting
| destroyed by "biggest ever recorded" tropical cyclones.
|
| Maybe he meant Sweden finally being able to grow and export
| bananas?
| yes_really wrote:
| > Which economy? Certainly not the ones that are getting
| destroyed by "biggest ever recorded" tropical cyclones.
|
| The literature is mixed on whether climate change is really
| the cause on these recent natural disasters and, if it is, on
| how it impacts those disasters (e.g. reducing the frequency
| of the disasters, changing their location, etc).
|
| > Maybe he meant Sweden finally being able to grow and export
| bananas?
|
| Your example of Sweden is a rich country, but most of the
| increases in crop production would take place on developing
| countries - and that is a big deal for them.
| olliej wrote:
| Massive crop failures across poorer equatorial regions have
| become increasingly regular.
|
| Longer, harder, droughts, and then extreme water events
| that can't retain much of the water causes other problems
| beyond just floods.
|
| Economists have historically proven to be extremely
| inaccurate at predicting long term patterns. They also have
| a strong bias in favour of business, so always find
| "supporting evidence" for almost any choice creating
| immediate gains for business.
|
| An easy measure is: has any major economic "study" ever
| supported raising taxes for businesses or the rich? Have
| they supported investing in employee welfare? Universal
| healthcare? Etc
|
| In countries that have done this, and thus actually
| measured the outcomes, they have found things have improved
| for the majority of people.
|
| In countries that have followed the "reduce taxes and
| services" to improve society we have for decades seen the
| exact opposite, and yet economists still claim that life
| will improve for people. Again, this is despite decades of
| direct contrary evidence.
|
| Economics is a fiction, the only actual supported piece of
| economic theory is supply vs demand. That's it.
| yes_really wrote:
| For people that are lost on how climate change could be
| positive: it causes higher crop yields, and increases the
| temperature in cold regions (saving people from freezing to
| death and saving huge amounts of energy in heating).
|
| Economists have performed many analyses on these and the
| conclusions indicate the consequences of climate change are
| much more mild that what the media, NGOs and politicians
| propagate. It's revolting that institutions have kept this
| scientific analysis away from the general population and have
| been feeding us political hysteria instead. The fact that even
| educated, rational, successful engineers in Hacker News are not
| aware of these data is another argument for why Twitter
| shouldn't be censoring ads in this political way.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| "Science" is NEVER decided and the fact they are doing this is
| specifically and explicitly ANTI-SCIENCE. It is itself
| misinformation.
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| I guess this shows the slippery slope fallacy isn't always
| fallacious.
|
| The problem with "consensus" as a measure is that consensus is
| always moving. We need to encourage professional and laypersons
| alike to embrace the freedom to be wrong as everything is wrong
| until it is right.
|
| And what constitutes consensus? If Mazda puts out an ad saying
| that ICE cars contribute less than transoceanic shipping, is that
| acceptable? It's factual, but it goes against the consensus that
| ICE cars need to be eliminated.
|
| I get this is ads, not user generated content, though the
| chilling effect is there.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I guess this shows the slippery slope fallacy isn't always
| fallacious.
|
| No, it's still always fallacious. The argument "it's going to
| rain today because it's Saturday and it always rains on
| Saturday" is fallacious even on the occasions that it does rain
| on Saturday.
| yakak wrote:
| Freedom of speech in advertising means you are paying and have
| a monetization strategy. That is more commonly known as fraud
| and many systems might ultimately penalize platforms when they
| catch up with their being new outlets for new frauds.
|
| Maybe cigarettes are the new health food! Maybe, but if the
| consensus is no it is unethical and hopefully illegal to
| present a case as a cigarette manufacturer directly to the
| people as a run around of systems of critique. Each member of
| the public can't be individually expected to resist all logical
| fallacies that are profitable cons, no?
| tensor wrote:
| In contrast, I get downright scared when people are allowed to
| use their money to pay for a louder voice and potentially
| interfere with discussions around science or politics. That's
| both immoral and dangerous.
| rnd0 wrote:
| I disagree. I think that platforms have some sort of
| responsibility to vet the ads who run on their platform. Not
| just for science or politics but in general.
|
| 1/2 of the reason I have used an adblocker for 20 years is
| because of how often straight-up malware has made it onto
| advertising networks because of a lack of vetting.[1]
|
| There's a discussion to be had about twitter and social media
| removing posts and posters but I don't feel like this is that
| discussion. I feel like this is a positive (or at least
| neutral) development.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising#History
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| I don't have a problem with a company exercising editorial
| control over ads. The concern comes from the measure being
| used (scientific consensus).
|
| 1. Twitter is not and ought not be the adjudicator of what
| has or lacks consensus.
|
| 2. Using consensus as a measure implies that it is immutable.
| We should have learned during COVID that consensus is
| incredibly variable
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Consensus has never meant immutable.
| PraetorianGourd wrote:
| Exactly, and policies and rules should be as immutable as
| possible thus showing that consensus is a bad measure
| here.
| 8note wrote:
| I'm not clear that policies and rules should be
| immutable, nor as immutable as possible. Rules are an
| adversarial game, and being responsive is useful
| indymike wrote:
| > I disagree
|
| At one time, consensus was bleeding with leeches cured
| disease, owning humans was normal and legal, sugar was good
| for you and so on.
| rnd0 wrote:
| The difference being that these days we at least pay lip
| service to the scientific method and reproducibility.
|
| I'd much prefer to rely on that than on what some
| disinformation-fed Q-anon supporter proposes. And I'd
| prefer to not give bad actors (eg folks who spread anti-
| vaccine disinformation) a platform at all.
| indymike wrote:
| Status quo is easy.
| rnd0 wrote:
| injecting ivermectin or bleach or whatever qanon covid
| cure du jour ...is hard
|
| Which, frankly, is a good thing.
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Are other people allowed to disagree with that view?
| 8note wrote:
| And people used twitter to disprove those?
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > ICE cars contribute less than transoceanic shipping
|
| It's not factual, unless you are talking about bullshit
| measurement that focus on sulfur pollutants that we accept on
| the middle of the ocean because they do almost not damage there
| (and have no relation at all with Global Warming).
| jeffbee wrote:
| In what way is that factual? The data I can easily punch up at
| the moment indicates global shipping emitted 1 billion tons of
| CO2 in 2020 and automobiles emitted 3 billion tons.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| This is great. No longer will I need to see people claiming that
| climate is an existential threat, likely to snuff out human
| society by the end of the century. Oh wait, those aren't the
| untruthful extremists we're talking about?
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think they have the money to buy enough twitter ads for
| you to see them
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| They don't need to, they get organic tweets from any media
| publication.
|
| I can't say I've seen ads denying climate change anyway, the
| closest I've seen was stuff from Exxon saying something
| climate change friendly trying to convince you they support
| green policies.
| AHappyCamper wrote:
| Thank goodness science is in COMPLETE agreement when it comes to
| climate. I mean, if there was more than one scientific opinion
| about climate, then this ban would be ludicrous....
| civilized wrote:
| Awesome. Finally someone decided to ban something that's actually
| unambiguously bad, useless, and materially harmful.
|
| Even with Trump, whose banning I support, you could argue there
| was some value in knowing what the President had on his mind.
|
| I really don't need to know what Exxon's PR hacks want me to
| believe about climate change, even just for informational value.
| I'm extraordinarily well-aware of what they want me to think and
| why.
|
| Some things are just evil, and they become more evil and more
| powerful the more you feed them. Hitler was one. Exxon talking
| about climate change is another.
| 8note wrote:
| I think it's interesting to know what Exxon's PR is thinking,
| though I don't think money spent is the right way to prioritize
| their thoughts vs anything else
| pixl97 wrote:
| If you want to know what Exxon's PR is thinking just listen
| to your average Texas senator.
| pornel wrote:
| Exxon's PR is always thinking FUD, such as "banning our anti-
| scientific PR ads is a slippery slope towards banning all
| science (because who can tell the difference between new
| revolutionary theory that upends thousands of peer-reviewed
| papers in 280 characters, and our lies)".
| Proven wrote:
| deanCommie wrote:
| The terms "progressive" and "conservative" have been completely
| stripped of meaning in our political discourse, (like "agile"!)
| but fundamentally they have a core meaning.
|
| Progressive philosophy is to seek change to improve/fix problems,
| even with the risk that action can have side effects that also
| will need to be dealt with.
|
| Conservative philosophy is to maintain the status quo and not
| take action to address problems even if they are causing harm -
| until we can establish all possible side effects can be dealt
| with. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence )
|
| Which is why it's so strange and disappointing to me to see the
| overall discourse on this site about Twitter and the steps they
| take to try to deal with misinformation on global society-
| impacting subjects like pandemics, vaccines, and climate change.
|
| People are not wrong to worry about knock-on effects, but it's
| shocking to me that by default most of the comment upvotes
| suggest it's preferable to do absolutely nothing and offer no
| moderation of content like this.
|
| This would never fly in our day-to-day jobs. If HackerNews is for
| startup enterpreneurs, being stuck in analysis paralysis is no
| way to build a startup. Progressive bias for action is the only
| available option.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Reading this thread, one of two things must be true.
|
| 1. HN commenters simply refuse to read articles.
|
| 2. The average HN commenter is extremely stupid.
|
| The idea that Twitter Ads are somehow the right place for
| scientific peer review to happen is so absurdly stupid that I
| can't imagine that either 1 or 2 is not blatantly true, if not
| both. Otherwise, I have no explanation for the comments talking
| about censorship, problems with academic publishing, etc.
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