3 ms·

The leap from getting rid of hate/nation-state/conspiracy/medical/etc. misinfo spam to preventing the next scientific breakthrough seems not in line with misinf

The leap from getting rid of hate/nation-state/conspiracy/medical/etc. misinfo spam to preventing the next scientific breakthrough seems not in line with misinfo nor science: -- Social media (in the US) is a red herring for science censorship. Most research funding is already tied to the politics of NIH/NSF/etc. program directors and the administrations above them. I'd start there if you're worried about science censorship. -- Social media misinformation has little to do with science. If anything, just as it is a cost for society in general, it has been a tax on science as well: Ex: I have research hospital colleagues wasting pandemic resources having to debunk crackpot drug theories because of social media employees & VPs building world-scale companies that mainstream medical misinfo in exchange for higher engagement, and Republican politicians riding those manipulated constituents enough to impact how pandemic time and $ gets spent. Ex: Misinformation often uses science as its vector, which in turn hurts the credibility used for supporting real science and translating its results

beaner 6y ago
Twitter has a policy stating that you can't post things contradicting the CDC. The CDC originally said that masks don't do anything. A very obvious layperson assumption would be that masks do do something, because if it comes from your face, and you put a barrier over your face, that would seem pretty damn likely to reduce spread. It's 5-year old logic and obvious. According to these policies, saying so was prohibited behavior. Now we all wear masks. If Twitter is a platform that actually harms people sharing thoughts on masks, how can this policy be trusted to be accurate for other things? Some of the drugs in question are not future research but are available today, and the question is just whether or not to try them. Some of these drugs are clearly very politicized as well. I already have no faith that the CDC can get it right from its own incompetence. I have less faith that it isn't also politicized. People should be allowed to speak freely, not ruled by the tyranny of the elite who think they know what's best for people.
- lmeyerov 6y ago
  The topic was on better misinfo spam enforcement not preventing the next Darwin - the industry of performing significant science.
  - beaner 6y ago
    Edit: for context, this comment was originally in response to a larger comment that I see has been pared down. > it's unclear why medical misinfo should get a free pass in the US system Because it's an arbitrary category. What about cars, or computers, art, or politics? Imagine having fact checks and censorship for what constitutes good art. Handling misinformation is not an artificial problem, it's a systemic problem because it always comes back to human judgment, and humans are not and can never be omniscient. Jack's supposed motivation for allowing or disallowing certain things doesn't matter in the face of what they actually implement in reality: banning both true information and false information, in the name of fighting "misinformation." It is true that private citizens and companies can do whatever they want. And it would be really great if what they truly wanted was to fight "misinformation." But what is apparent is that everyone on every side of heated situations on the internet nearly always wants to remove information that they specifically disagree with - and if that information may actually be true, but there is an authority that can be appealed to who will vouch for the un-truthiness of it anyway - then that authority's opinion will be taken for granted and hoisted upon others. It takes a lot of guts to say "I think you're wrong but I'm going to allow you to speak." Cutting people's voice out is cowardly, and dangerous at scale. When you attempt to cut off the bottom of the bell curve on the false->true spectrum, you never do just that. You cut off the top, too. When you simply remove false claims rather than let people engage in a way that they're corrected, they don't learn. It is more likely to stoke a resentment leading to planting down harder than anything else. And when you cut out the top of the bell curve, you don't always just remove truths that counter mistruths. A small percent of the time you remove original thinking. And this is what the original commenter was talking about.

beaner 6y ago

Twitter has a policy stating that you can't post things contradicting the CDC. The CDC originally said that masks don't do anything. A very obvious layperson assumption would be that masks do do something, because if it comes from your face, and you put a barrier over your face, that would seem pretty damn likely to reduce spread. It's 5-year old logic and obvious. According to these policies, saying so was prohibited behavior. Now we all wear masks. If Twitter is a platform that actually harms people sharing thoughts on masks, how can this policy be trusted to be accurate for other things? Some of the drugs in question are not future research but are available today, and the question is just whether or not to try them. Some of these drugs are clearly very politicized as well. I already have no faith that the CDC can get it right from its own incompetence. I have less faith that it isn't also politicized. People should be allowed to speak freely, not ruled by the tyranny of the elite who think they know what's best for people.

lmeyerov 6y ago
The topic was on better misinfo spam enforcement not preventing the next Darwin - the industry of performing significant science.
- beaner 6y ago
  Edit: for context, this comment was originally in response to a larger comment that I see has been pared down. > it's unclear why medical misinfo should get a free pass in the US system Because it's an arbitrary category. What about cars, or computers, art, or politics? Imagine having fact checks and censorship for what constitutes good art. Handling misinformation is not an artificial problem, it's a systemic problem because it always comes back to human judgment, and humans are not and can never be omniscient. Jack's supposed motivation for allowing or disallowing certain things doesn't matter in the face of what they actually implement in reality: banning both true information and false information, in the name of fighting "misinformation." It is true that private citizens and companies can do whatever they want. And it would be really great if what they truly wanted was to fight "misinformation." But what is apparent is that everyone on every side of heated situations on the internet nearly always wants to remove information that they specifically disagree with - and if that information may actually be true, but there is an authority that can be appealed to who will vouch for the un-truthiness of it anyway - then that authority's opinion will be taken for granted and hoisted upon others. It takes a lot of guts to say "I think you're wrong but I'm going to allow you to speak." Cutting people's voice out is cowardly, and dangerous at scale. When you attempt to cut off the bottom of the bell curve on the false->true spectrum, you never do just that. You cut off the top, too. When you simply remove false claims rather than let people engage in a way that they're corrected, they don't learn. It is more likely to stoke a resentment leading to planting down harder than anything else. And when you cut out the top of the bell curve, you don't always just remove truths that counter mistruths. A small percent of the time you remove original thinking. And this is what the original commenter was talking about.