21 ms·

The Crime of Curiosity

376 points by prostoalex 5y ago

ssijak 5y ago
I don't understand this social platforms. Covid stuff and fake news aside, I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question, and only once they did remove it. All the other times I get a message that they reviewed my complaint, that it does not go against their standards/tos/bla bla, and that I can block the video/post/channel for myself. And taking into account how many random stuff they ban proactively, it just does not compute in my logic board in the brain.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  Most things are badly done. Most social media companies are not doing moderation well. Fitting the general pattern of most things are garbage. But some things are not! Find them and treasure them.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  It's the same way ADHD is both under- and over- diagnosed. If you're bad enough at your job, you can both miss the majority of content that is harmful, and wind up taking down significantly more false positives than truly harmful material.
- nix0n 5y ago
  A few days ago, I learned that "Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules"[0]. Maybe there's something like that happening on youtube also. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121
  - type0 5y ago
    I'm sure it does something similar. The Big Media has utterly different standards on what counts as disinformation on Youtube, what was the last time any official media channels got de-platformed?
    - sionide 5y ago
      Last month https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-from-youtube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-austr...
      - jtbayly 5y ago
        That’s not being deplatformed.
- wpietri 5y ago
  It's a legitimately hard problem. It's also something that they would rather not deal with and don't make any money from. Plus, it's basically unregulated and platforms mostly don't disclose any stats on how they're doing, so there's no real accountability. One way to think about it is guilt vs shame. Guilt is where you feel bad because you've violated your own standards. Shame is where you feel bad because somebody of standing has called you out. Platforms generally feel shame but not guilt, so most of their actual improvements in anti-abuse and TOS enforcement come from PR messes and other things that trigger shame. But when the heat is off and it's just you reporting something, they're not going to be particularly bothered.
  - kfrzcode 5y ago
    Guilt, and shame, are both *human emotions*. "Platforms," feel nothing.
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      It's just a bunch of people. But you are right in a sense, that is is a large enough group that it's momentum will crush any feelings of individuals in the team.
      - robbedpeter 5y ago
        Platforms aren't a bunch of people. They're algorithmic constructs being executed by humans and computers and other constructs. Facebook, Twitter, etc, lack any meaningful human in the loop, but have evolved rules and behaviors that are more or less independent of human judgment. The only way to get a rational human back in the mix is through legislation or litigation. Given sufficient repetition, eventually those things are abstracted and encoded again, in a cycle seemingly designed to prefer nonhuman control systems.
        simiones 5y ago
        The rules are still designed by an organization ultimately run by humans, and the outcomes are also measured ultimately by human decision makers. The technical platform is still ultimately an extension of the organization, which is the entity that ultimately has human goals - mostly profit, and avoiding outcomes that threaten that profit.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  > I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence Back when I had a Facebook account, I just started reporting all ads as sexually explicit. They always came back with "no it isn't" but it took a while. And I stopped seeing ads.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question" Probably not worth debating this further, but I would contest that number. I lean very much towards unrestricted flow of information (and I know, there are way more radical ones around here). Not total unrestricted, with excemptions like CP, but my default is also just not look at content I find disturbing. Which means I basically avoid most of those social platforms altogether, as I indeed find most the bs posted there disturbing.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  All social media companies are 100% evil. They are the "bad guys". They are pro-totalitarian, pro-collectivist. They are what has always been wrong with humanity - those who embrace evil. If you work for these companies and don't quit for simple ethical and moral reasons, YOU are part of the problem and aiding and abetting evil!
peter303 5y ago
Isaacsons new book Code Breakers about CRISPR has a couple positive chapters on Zaynor. (Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs in his final months for the definitive biography.)
- lostlogin 5y ago
  I think that’s a typo and I’m after Josiah Zayner, the author of the the article here? Thanks for the connection, that book looks really interesting.
Syonyk 5y ago
> A day after YouTube took down my video, I received an email. They banned me for life. This is not only to say I could no longer upload content. I could no longer even login. We are, sadly, long since past the time that cloud providers, free content hosting, YouTube, etc, has to be considered hostile to anything outside the tech industry's consensus of what's allowed (as interpreted by their algorithms, which they like to pretend are fancy, but seem only barely smarter than keyword matching, except when they're rather dumber). Of course, due to Scale(TM), you can't actually have any humans in the loop. Unless, of course, you're well enough connected to get a bit of a rise on a tech news site, at which point a human will (usually) step in, mutter something about a mistake, fix the problem (the actual problem being the bad PR created), and go on their way. If you're posting funny reaction videos to nonsense content, sure, use YouTube. For anything serious, this is no longer a good idea (well, if you're outside the tech industry consensus for whatever that is today). But if you are even the slightest bit outside the mainstream, you probably shouldn't be using YouTube, or even the various cloud based hosting services. Your own server, in a local datacenter, perhaps fronted by CloudFront, is closer to the right answer anymore. In the rush to free services, we've handed far, far too much power to a very small set of companies, who are now happy to use that power to turn the internet into only what they want to hear.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Plenty of serious content survives on YouTube. I'd say posting something at the intersection of fringe and dangerous can get your content canned, and unfortunately for the article author, "How to cook a COVID-19 vaccine in your kitchen" is in that category.
  - liamcottam 5y ago
    I hardly trust the chicken I cook, I wouldn't trust anything biological I cooked up near me but it'd be nice to know the process in detail.
autoliteInline 5y ago
I wonder if there isn't a market for a COVID vaccine that the inevitable variants aren't resistant to. If you kept it to a small group of customers, it would maintain it's value and be worth $$$$ to them potentially.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  That's certainly the future. Mass vaccination might have made it better for costs on tptb in the past. But, if that doesn't work because a sufficient amount of the population refuses to cooperate...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- GuB-42 5y ago
  AFAIK, variants are not "resistant" to vaccines, they are just different, so a vaccine targeting the previous strand will be less effective because it doesn't match perfectly. There is no better vaccine than the one for the current dominant variants. You can't really target future mutations because you don't know what the future mutations will be. You can imagine restricting the best, most current vaccine to the rich to limit escape mutations but besides the obvious ethical concerns, the virus will mutate anyways. Better vaccinate everyone with the best, because the less people infected, the less chances you give the virus to mutate.
  - gweinberg 5y ago
    Current vaccines aren't optimized for the currently dominant Covid strains, they're optimized for the Covid strains that were around a year and a half ago.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  The problem, IMO, with the current vaccination system is not that lots of people aren't getting their shots with the available vaccines (although that's sad); the problem is how many hoops have to be jumped through to get the vaccines on the market at all. The GOP could have legitimately criticized Big Government on this if they hadn't swallowed all the stupid. Freedom doesn't mean just the freedom to decline a vaccine; it means the freedom to act without the government's permission.
phkahler 5y ago
>> monopoly speech platforms are also sloppily banning any form of science that doesn’t come from ‘ordained’ sources. It's not just that. The real message is that individuals are not able to make decisions or do things for themselves. This is why any medical treatment that doesn't involve surgery or prescriptions is thrown in with homeopathy and general quackery. It's not just companies either, individuals will look at you funny if you do anything not sanctioned by some perceived source of truth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  Nobody has to use YouTube. There are many other video hosting/watching platforms. None of them are especially popular because they get filled with a lot of junk, because they attract the people who can't host their content on YouTube. In a way, this dynamic is an effective, natural check on moderation. If moderation primarily removes stuff that most people think is junk, then alternatives competing on reduced moderation will be junk. If moderation removes valuable stuff that lots of people want, then other platforms that host it instead will receive more traffic and legitimacy. It's kind of like the Reddit vs. Voat thing. Reddit isn't great, but Voat ended up a cesspool, because Reddit's biggest exoduses were driven by hate groups.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    Nonsense. A monopoly does not conform to the rules a "normal" company does. Rumble does not compete with YouTube, because a generation of uploaders have put essentially every piece of TV, music, movies, conference proceedings, and every other form of media on YouTube. If you're wondering if something unusual is online, you would always look on YouTube first. And then stay there.
    - breckenedge 5y ago
      I disagree. You’re confusing network effects with monopoly. YouTube is not a monopoly.
jimbob45 5y ago
At the core of YouTube's censorship is the idea that people aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos they should watch. They don't know what's good for them. Whatever you may think of that idea, surely the idea that YouTube, which reduces down to a bunch of people sitting behind desks, should get to decide what others watch is questionable. That is, they think a small group of people are wiser and more intelligent than everyone and should get to curate and censor content for the majority at will.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > At the core of YouTube's censorship is the idea that people aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos they should watch. They don't know what's good for them. I'm not sure I'd agree. I think that's putting far too much faith in them. YouTube's goal, roughly stated, is "More Hours Watched." This, in whatever form is appropriate, is pretty much the end goal of any social media sharing handwave etc platform. More eyeball-hours to sell ads to. For a while, YouTube's algorithms (which I think are almost certainly too dumb to have any idea what a video is about) pushed conspiracy theory content for the simple reason that if you can get someone watching conspiracy theory content on YouTube, they're very likely to continue watching conspiracy theory content on YouTube. Of the people who watch video 1234, 30% of them then watch dramatically more YouTube afterwards, so the more people you can show video 1234 to, the more hours will be watched - think "paperclip maximizer," not "Muahaha, we will drive people down conspiracy rabbit holes!" Of course, do this long enough, and eventually you have a problem - bad press coverage about how you're driving people down conspiracy rabbit holes. Whoops. But the problem here, from YouTube's perspective, isn't that you're driving people down conspiracy theory rabbit holes - it's the standard tech industry problem that you're getting bad press for it. Bad press is bad for hours viewed. So you fix the problem, and issue the standard tech industry appy polly loggy - "We are so, so sorry you caught us doing this and we will do the work to ensure that you don't catch us doing it in the future." I don't think YouTube particularly cares about Covid misinformation or [whatever]. They care about the bad press from being seen hosting it, which might impact people's opinion of them and reduce hours watched. To claim that the algorithms understand anything beyond the title or such is to claim a capability that has no evidence for existing.
ftrobro 5y ago
"Democratizing genetic engineering won’t suddenly unleash bioterrorism upon the world." How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would not want to see it "democratized".
- frazbin 5y ago
  Yeah I was with him up to that point. "None of the kits we sell contain anything dangerous, nor is the average person experimenting with biology inherently dangerous. If you are trying to engineer something hazardous — like say a bat virus — you might have a problem, but the genome search space is large enough that accidentally creating a harmful organism is astronomically improbable. Access to most dangerous materials are also heavily restricted..." This sounds really sketchy to me. I can't tell if he's lying or if he really can't see any further than his own research program.. sometimes a field of research is just actually existentially dangerous for life on earth, you can't handwave it away. The possibility of biohacking as a hobby is thrilling. Trouble is, the dangers are so extreme they're difficult to even think about. Like, thought experiment: can you design a virus that kills all eukaryotic cells? Can you think of other possibilities equally terrifying? Of course stuff like that is far off, but neither you nor this guy know whether 'far off' means 10, 100, or 1000 years. We already have examples of substances that are strictly harmful to almost all life.. Dispersal of them (via the democratization of access to Chemistry) is already placing stress on the biosphere.. which again, is such a large and horrible thing it's hard to imagine or reason about. Another thing: it is still plausible that covid was a lab escape. I think the biohacker community should be incredibly humbled by that, and really think about how they'll be seen in decades to come.. we've seen cycles of technologists becoming disgraced because of the impact of their products; those cycles seem poised to accelerate. Maybe this is a good time to get on the right side of history?
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    Do you see any comparison to Machine Learning? I get the impression he considers himself like a hobbyist running some models on their home GPU. Without access to server farms, there is an almost zero percent chance a home hobbyist invents an AI capable of displacing large amounts of human workers or setting off nukes on its own. AI is dangerous, but can be explored safely by a small practitioner. Perhaps these biomaterials are more sensitive though.
johnhenry 5y ago
I wonder if the video had prominent "Don't try this at home" warnings?
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  The whole point of his video and work is to democratize science. He sells kits to let you do genetics science at home. Ie, a disclaimer would not make sense considering his objective
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> In general, I think I understand where the criticism is coming from. Every time I post on social media about being deplatformed, banned, or silenced, someone chimes in with their own story about being banned because “big government is trying to suppress the fact that echinacea cures Covid” or whatever. Spoiler, echinacea doesn’t cure Covid, but this is the kind of crazy nonsense my work is compared to. Are you a credential person? Great, I’m a scientist with a PhD from one of the top universities in the world. I’ve worked at NASA. I’ve published a number of papers. I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've published 'a number of papers.'" Lol. > The problem isn’t my thoroughly detailed research, which I would love to have critiqued in good faith. The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.” Indeed. They are not capable of doing basic analysis of every video, or hiring a team that can. Billions of dollars aren't enough to hire a team to analyze every video on youtube.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the "echinacea cures Covid" claim probably isn't true, but the CDC and YouTube people seem to have decided that ANY claims about therapeutics must be suppressed. There isn't any objective reason for this; it's purely political side-taking. As for your research: are you saying there are no forums where your work can be "critiqued in good faith"? Or just that YouTube isn't that forum? Because you're right -- it isn't.
- hnuser123456 5y ago
  >I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've published 'a number of papers.'" Lol. There are situations where you have someone who truly has deep merit meeting someone who believes they do and who and tries to relate to the former, but is so far disconnected that they have categorically different experience which immediately disqualifies the latter, but the general public would be unable to recognize, yet it would take significant effort for the former to explain the situation to an extent the public could understand, and at risk to the emotions and ego of the latter. Surely you can relate to this situation to some extent?
Imnimo 5y ago
I do sympathize with him, and I think his specific content should be available on YouTube, but I can also see why YouTube would want to ban him. If I'm YouTube, and I don't really understand anything about biohacking, do I really want to take the risk of promoting material about making your own vaccines? Sure, this guy's content is informative and valuable, but it wouldn't be long before you have someone less competent promoting a self-made vaccine that kills someone. If YouTube doesn't feel it has the expertise to distinguish the two, I can see why it would be prudent to just ban them all.
- concordDance 5y ago
  It would be good if YouTube weren't held responsible for the content they host (by both media and regulators). Its not fair to blame the transmitter for the content.
  - Imnimo 5y ago
    Well, but even beyond regulators and media, if I'm a parent, do I want to let my kid watch videos on a site where they might click over to a how-to on a homemade medicine that'll kill them? And if I'm the guy running YouTube, will I sleep well at night if users of my site die after trying something that they saw on my site? I think even if I were just running YouTube in my basement and had zero media or regulator attention, I'd want to avoid that just for my own conscience.
    - concordDance 5y ago
      Would you also feel responsible as a cloud storage provider? An ISP? A phone manufacturer? An electricity provider?
daenz 5y ago
>Trust is antithetical to science. Never heard it put this way before, but I think I agree with it.
ve55 5y ago
The potential costs of systemically removing correct but controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to scientific progress in general. Sure, we remove thousands of obviously false and likely harmful posts, and there are cases to be made for why that may be good, but sometimes hidden within those thousands of posts was something that may have had a tremendously positive effect, but yet could not be separated from the noise. "The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most major tech platforms. This system seems to be helpful in some areas until it makes some mistakes, in which case the effects are catastrophic. Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work" was considered misinformation along with "a vaccine is likely to happen within a year or two", along with "this may be related to a lab leak", along with... Reality is always changing and uncertain and our policies should reflect that we do not have it all figured out, nor will we (collectively) ever. (Edit: as one commenter expressed skepticism of the mask claim, read over a link like https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_for_sending_my_son_to_school_with_medical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_... about how normal people felt about masks in the first few months of covid. It's pretty shocking and I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality just re-reading it and the top responses). Now that our infrastructure is being expanded and built out with censoring of 'incorrect' information as a top priority, I fear for how bad the mistakes we make in the future may be.
- reginold 5y ago
  Yeah the whole "censoring" stuff ratcheted up really fast. Kinda crazy.
  - Animats 5y ago
    It's scary. Imagine the US five years from now, with Team Trump in charge of the censoring.
    - reginold 5y ago
      Banning Trump from Twitter...the pendulum will indeed swing the other way. How long do we have. The clock is ticking on open source, decentralized solutions. Nothing else is relevant.
donmcronald 5y ago
> I'm hesitant to say it worked because vaccines are complicated and we’d need further testing to confirm our results. That's the line that makes me interested enough to read more and think about what the author is saying. Misinformation doesn't typically come with a disclaimer saying it might be wrong, so that tells me the author isn't being intentionally deceiving or spreading information where they have no clue what's happening. Reading more, it actually piques my curiosity a bit. It reminds me of board level electronics repair before I saw Louis Rossmann's YouTube channel. I always thought it was impossible, but then you watch one video of him doing it and realize all the rhetoric about it being difficult, impossible, and dangerous is just that; rhetoric. I don't know what the answer is in terms of dealing with misinformation, but one thing I believe fairly strongly is that letting large, private institutions decide what's fact and what's fiction is problematic. The "facts" will always align with their business interests. I'd even say it's risky to let big companies like manufacturers get away with their lies. I KNOW electronic and appliance manufacturers are lying about the complexity of their products because I can watch a YouTube video and fix a lot of what they claim is unfixable or too dangerous to fix. Considering that, WTF am I supposed to believe when I read an article like this and someone is saying that biotech isn't as complicated as the profit driven institutions claim? There's got to be some truth to it if they behave the same as the electronics industry, right? Or am I sliding into anti-vaxxer territory? No matter what, I think it would be a great step forward if we stopped accepting deceit and disinformation as being a normal thing for large corporations and institutions to engage in. We have so many provable examples in the electronic repair industry alone that I think it's endemic. Maybe if the big companies didn't lie so much, there would be less distrust and less of an opportunity for people to spread misinformation and propaganda.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  I agree that's an important bar, but intentional misinformation purveyors will learn to use that language too if necessary. It's necessary but not sufficient. Note: I dont' think this guy should have been removed from youtube, and have no reason to doubt the veracity of his story, it seems plausible and interesting.
bserge 5y ago
Everybody back to your own domains and hosting (not fucking Amazon!). If your server provider bans you, then we have a real problem.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Then you rent a T1 line, and not from Comcast.
  - slim 5y ago
    Or use framatube (torrent based video)
reginold 5y ago
What's the best video platform that supports open standards and censorship resistance? Is self-hosting the only option?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
perihelions 5y ago
Also covered by Reason (whose reporting on Zayner was likewise censored), https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-reason-video https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-re... ("Why Did YouTube Remove This Reason Video?") edit: Here's a complete transcript of the censored material, post by Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/17/youtube-removes-march-2020-reason-video-about-biohackers-working-on-diy-vaccine/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/17/youtube-removes-march-2...
Barrin92 5y ago
The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube. 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. The correct platform for something like this is a separate forum or community where enthusiasts meet with some barrier to entry, not the mass media. I immediately question the motive of someone who promotes individual science or 'hacking' and seeks the largest mass media audience. I think the motive is much more straight forward. The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool, but the appropriate audience for the kind of things he did, like treat himself with CRISPR or replace his entire microbiome to treat IBS is probably a community more self-selected than HN, not Youtube, which is mainstream television for young adults.
- foerbert 5y ago
  I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material. He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable. But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.
  - equality_1138 5y ago
    Exactly. I read this as a much broader critique of the scientific community. As YouTube is seen as a mass media company, it's not hard to accept their content decisions. He didn't fight it. I also believe any company that markets themselves as tech industry should not be this cagey about their relationship to science. It's an ethical question not a legal one. Jumping to the legal aspect seems like a big misunderstanding of the piece. Also funny to question whether the guy is acting on financial incentives to promote his ideas. Of course he does.
carlisle_ 5y ago
My question is how can platforms ensure only “good” science is done at the scale they operate at? So many pseudosciences hide behind jargon, how much scientific education is required to delineate between the two at the velocity people want? A company might take two weeks to review and approve a flagged post, but isn’t the damage already done for how these platforms operate?
djoldman 5y ago
You don't have a right to service from a private company. Why are people so surprised and or angered by this? The law is clear: you can be denied service as long as the reason you are being denied is not your sex, religion, etc. [Protected classes]. If you go to a restaurant and they don't like you they can throw you out, and so can a hardware store, and a movie theater, etc. (Exempting the protected reasons). Find another service. This makes sense. Why should a company be forced to allow people on their property? Or use their property? They shouldn't be forced, as long as they're not discriminating.
- reginold 5y ago
  People are surprised and or angered by this because they aren't as clear on the law as you are. It's understandable, and they need help to better understand how it works. With that in mind, got any other services that would be replacements?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Note that even if there are no replacements, a private business can still refuse to provide you with service. It could be the only restaurant in town, and the next town might be 85 miles away and you might not have a car. Under US law, that's your problem, not the restaurant's.
  - djoldman 5y ago
    You're right and I posted in frustration :( Other services... Well I think you can still view YouTube without an account. As for publishing, Vimeo?
    - reginold 5y ago
      It happens to me as well, appreciate your thoughtfulness. Vimeo is still the same deal - same weaknesses as YouTube, just less popular.
  - RIMR 5y ago
    Why do people always ask "What other privately owned service I don't have control over can I use?" instead of asking "How can I make my own platform that I have control over?". Peertube, off the top of my head, would be the exact tool for the job.
tomlockwood 5y ago
> ... monopoly speech platforms are also sloppily banning any form of science that doesn’t come from ‘ordained’ sources. > ... > I’m sorry, it’s complete bullshit. Science is not something to be believed or trusted. Trust is antithetical to science. Show me the data, and let me decide for myself. Cool, agreed, but, these arguments sound identical to those made by anti-vaxxers who believe vaccines cause autism.
drumhead 5y ago
Youtube are a private company and as such can publish or not who or whatever they want. They arent obligated to publish anything. There are video platforms that however will, so he can use those instead. But I think the complaint in not rooted in Youtubes behaviour as much as it may be in the authors desire to be seen by as many people as possible. The ability to seek attention is much diminished on other platforms.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Why are people still repeating that private company nonsense? Your same argument was used against civil rights back when private companies were allowed to discriminate based on race. It's an appeal to the existing law and implies you believe the law is correct by default - whatever it might be - and needs no justification.
  - drumhead 5y ago
    So facebook and twitter should unban Trump?
    - concordDance 5y ago
      Yes?
fxtentacle 5y ago
Wow this guy is ignorant. Not everyone who is intelligent is a good person. In fact, some people just like to see the world burn. It might only be 0.5% of the population, but I totally get why he's investigated all the time. Selling a kit that allows bacteria to grow where they normally don't just seems like an obviously bad idea to me, even if his science ambitions are good and noble. One can learn a lot about chemistry by synthesizing explosives, but selling a diy detonation kit (even for research and learning) still seems wrong. And the potential to accidentally harm others, for example but getting genetically modified organisms on your skin and then touching stuff seems even higher here.
- satisfice 5y ago
  I spoke with an inventor, author of many books, and semi-famous Silicon Valley millionaire— whom I respect deeply— who told me that as a teenager he toured a Wunder Bread factory and saw how they used high heat to prevent mold or something. He decided to breed a temperature tolerant mold in his home and then see if he could spread it at the factory on another tour. That’s curiosity and science, too. Fortunately, he lost interest after having successfully bred the mold, and never carried the attack out. But you know what, I don’t want kids and sociopaths having easy access to biotech at home. Who knows what hacks will ensue that could devastate crops or economies. The OP says that is a small likelihood. The truth is he has no model that allows rational computation of the risk. The truth is he has faith. The author of the post understands the practice of science but not the sociology of trust that goes with the community of scientists. I don’t care how safe he declares his ideas to be, it’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    > t’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand. Luckily we're already protected from misleading and dangerous medicine with existing law. You're falsely pretending he's doing something worse than he really is. If you're so confident in your belief, why not just use truth instead of exaggeration?
andyxor 5y ago
you cant even ask a question these days without being canceled. This is probably the most unscientific timeline we are living in now where everything is politicized and questioning the "experts" is considered sacrilege. Even Nicki Minaj is being harassed for doubting the party line https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nicki-minaj-says-shes-in-twitter-jail-will-never-use-platform-again https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nicki-minaj-says-shes...
- angelzen 5y ago
  During the American Golden Era people were free to take whatever position they wanted separately for each individual issue. In 2021, if someone takes position X on an issue, one is expected to take position X on all issues, or suffer social consequences for dissent. > Using a broad set of issues from the American National Election Studies, we identify rapid growth in the correlations between political attitudes from 2004 to 2016. This emergence of issue alignment is most pronounced within the economic and civil rights domains, challenging the notion that current “culture wars” are grounded in moral issues. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X2030096X?dgcid=rss_sd_all https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490...
tptacek 5y ago
Can we start with the fact that not being allowed onto a company's video platform is not a criminal penalty?
ausbah 5y ago
people need to trust science because the average person doesn't have the scientific background necessary, much less the time, to evaluate the accuracy of everything scientific they deal with - especially in the realm of medicine like it's great you want to make things accessible and help people take charge of more things in life, but I don't think most people want that - and even of those who do say they want that, few will still take the time necessary to actually understand stuff correctly which leads to the related issue that caused all the regulations and regulators we have today, people falling prey to snake oil salesman and downright harmful products in the marketplace. just look at the state of "nutritional supplaments" today to me, I think people should just be more aware of the limitations of what they can really learn given the constraints of day to day life and accept that specialization is necessary to making modern society function - thus putting their trust in the appropriate authorities when necessary but even that is a idealistic goal so idk
- kongin 5y ago
  > people need to trust science because the average person doesn't have the scientific background necessary, much less the time, to evaluate the accuracy of everything scientific they deal with - especially in the realm of medicine People need to be given the information they need to make informed decisions on topics that impact them. I don't have the time or inclination to figure out if the levels of heavy metal exposure for welders in the third world are dangerous or not because it doesn't impact me. I have plenty of time to figure out if any chronic disease I get has promising treatments that haven't been approved yet. For the doctor it's a matter of a 9 to 5 job, for me it's a lot more urgent. I just look at sci-hub and the citation web of any papers I find there. You're saying that the solution to having an ignorant population is to make them even more ignorant for their own good. That is the type of thinking that got us the dark ages.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > people falling prey to snake oil salesman and downright harmful products in the marketplace. Just have institutions enforce labelling rather than banning. If COVID vids had big banners put underneath them saying "disputed"/"unproven"/"speculative"/"known false"/"likely false" I'd be happy (as long as it includes a link to what standards they are using). Similarly, the FDA should be able to enforce accurate labelling stating what level of verification a treatment has had, not be able to ban it. If people still want to buy the snake oil (maybe they like how it feels on their skin?) let them!
sporedro 5y ago
I’m not sure YouTube is the place for this content. Google does not seem to have any intention of providing ways to verify your credentials or providing references/facts. It’s clear YouTube is not the place people should be relying on to share this type of information or really share anything knowledge based. I would love to see almost a Wikipedia version of YouTube, where videos could be submitted by anyone and facts/references could be linked at any point of the video.
jpeloquin 5y ago
Biohacking in the sense of making E. coli grow on a different substrate, like in the ODIN kit, is pretty tame and unobjectionable. Promoting the manufacture and administration of homemade vaccines, though, is human subjects research, or _very_ close to it. The current manner in which society handles human subjects research came about through reaction to specific offenses, the main ones being Nazi experiments, government studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and common experimentation by clinicians on their patients. In reaction, definitions for human subjects research and principles to protect human subjects were established in the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration, and the Belmont Report. These principles exist not only to protect subjects but to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing. Promoting experimental (biohacked) treatments and guiding people through administering them is not compatible with the currently accepted ethical framework for protection of human subjects, _especially_ if it's done with intent of generating scientific knowledge. That, I think, is a large factor in why government and corporate entities do not wish do be seen as supporting, even tacitly, biohacking on humans. If you do biohacking on yourself quietly, no one will really care, but publishing what you learned makes it scientific research, and if it was done to a human it's human subjects research. So yes, the root of the conflict probably is a lack of acceptance by the "official science cult", but this conflict does not seem arbitrary or frivolous. Extension of current approaches to human subjects research to accommodate a public DIY biology / biohacking community may be possible but seems tricky to do without accidentally deregulating the whole field.
- ramblenode 5y ago
  > Promoting experimental (biohacked) treatments and guiding people through administering them is not compatible with the currently accepted ethical framework for protection of human subjects, _especially_ if it's done with intent of generating scientific knowledge. > Extension of current approaches to human subjects research to accommodate a public DIY biology / biohacking community may be possible but seems tricky to do without accidentally deregulating the whole field. This is incorrect. The ethical framework and laws surrounding human subjects research pertain to institutions, not to individuals. In the US, there is no human subjects research board for unaffiliated scientists/hobbyists that could approve or deny their research based on ethical considerations, as there is for institutions. The Belmont Report that established IRBs was specifically motivated by institutional abuse of the kind you mention, not general quackery. Marketing of quackery falls under the purview of the US FDA. There is no regulator for independent science. If you are independent and including others in your research, you are only bound by general medical ethics. See https://www.weber.edu/IRB/irb_history.html https://www.weber.edu/IRB/irb_history.html
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I'm baffled why anyone would believe that bioterrorism isn't a possible threat. I'm also baffled why anyone would fail to understand that the practice of medicine is protected. And that vaccines require mass testing before certification and public release. Because every genome is different and it's not just about the fact that you rolled the dice on a new treatment and personally got lucky. And that people who don't have PhDs - and many who do - can easily fuck up something as powerful as gene editing in countless ways, with fatal or life changing consequences for themselves and others. Given the very poor reliability of software hacking, "biohacking" is insane, by definition. When you have a population taking horse dewormer to treat Covid, handing out biohacking tools is like taping razor blades to the limbs of people who haven't learned how to walk without falling over just because some of them want to try something a bit different. This isn't about "censorship" or victimisation, it's about common sense and the precautionary principle.
- concordDance 5y ago
  I guess it depends whether you think we should let adults to risky things. Most libertarians believe that we should let people do what they like provided they don't harm others, which includes experimenting on their bodies to change their gut flora or genes. I say let people have their freedom, even if they use it in risky ways you find stupid, whether that's skydiving or anal sex or changing their genes.
bumbada 5y ago
While I understand this man's position, I also understand his opponents'. If something has become crystal clear with COVID is that there are secondary effects or unintended consequences coming from biological experimentation that could affect our life greatly. In the same way as Wuhan's lab relationship with bats and COVID, there is a relationship between a laboratory that was experimenting with chimpanzees and viruses 30 kms near the origin of AIDS. Playing at home could pose existential risk to society at large. You will have the best of intentions,like probably the Wuhan people had,but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- drran 5y ago
  LOL, virus escaped from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Novosibirsk, Russia, 16.09.2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8 . They were not played at home. They were not amateurs. But, as you can see at 1:04 (see soldier in background), first responders just cracked bio-laboratories and stole equipment after blast, because they are "checking building for fire" (поетажная проверка на загорание).
kloch 5y ago
The line between genius and crackpot is often very blurry. It seems most of his problems are from "guilt by association" and the rest are from doing serious work in very unconventional ways.
RattleyCooper 5y ago
>And the whole "believe science" thing? I’m sorry, it’s complete bullshit. Science is not something to be believed or trusted. Trust is antithetical to science. Show me the data, and let me decide for myself. This 1000 times. I keep having to tell people this and it's frustrating due to the fact that people who parrot "just trust the science" are acting more like religious zealots. "Trust the science" is just another way of saying "just have faith".

376 points by prostoalex 5y ago

I don't understand this social platforms. Covid stuff and fake news aside, I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question, and only once they did remove it. All the other times I get a message that they reviewed my complaint, that it does not go against their standards/tos/bla bla, and that I can block the video/post/channel for myself. And taking into account how many random stuff they ban proactively, it just does not compute in my logic board in the brain.

gameswithgo 5y ago
Most things are badly done. Most social media companies are not doing moderation well. Fitting the general pattern of most things are garbage. But some things are not! Find them and treasure them.
ravi-delia 5y ago
It's the same way ADHD is both under- and over- diagnosed. If you're bad enough at your job, you can both miss the majority of content that is harmful, and wind up taking down significantly more false positives than truly harmful material.
nix0n 5y ago
A few days ago, I learned that "Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules"[0]. Maybe there's something like that happening on youtube also. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512121
- type0 5y ago
  I'm sure it does something similar. The Big Media has utterly different standards on what counts as disinformation on Youtube, what was the last time any official media channels got de-platformed?
  - sionide 5y ago
    Last month https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-from-youtube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-austr...
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      That’s not being deplatformed.
wpietri 5y ago
It's a legitimately hard problem. It's also something that they would rather not deal with and don't make any money from. Plus, it's basically unregulated and platforms mostly don't disclose any stats on how they're doing, so there's no real accountability. One way to think about it is guilt vs shame. Guilt is where you feel bad because you've violated your own standards. Shame is where you feel bad because somebody of standing has called you out. Platforms generally feel shame but not guilt, so most of their actual improvements in anti-abuse and TOS enforcement come from PR messes and other things that trigger shame. But when the heat is off and it's just you reporting something, they're not going to be particularly bothered.
- kfrzcode 5y ago
  Guilt, and shame, are both *human emotions*. "Platforms," feel nothing.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    It's just a bunch of people. But you are right in a sense, that is is a large enough group that it's momentum will crush any feelings of individuals in the team.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      Platforms aren't a bunch of people. They're algorithmic constructs being executed by humans and computers and other constructs. Facebook, Twitter, etc, lack any meaningful human in the loop, but have evolved rules and behaviors that are more or less independent of human judgment. The only way to get a rational human back in the mix is through legislation or litigation. Given sufficient repetition, eventually those things are abstracted and encoded again, in a cycle seemingly designed to prefer nonhuman control systems.
      - simiones 5y ago
        The rules are still designed by an organization ultimately run by humans, and the outcomes are also measured ultimately by human decision makers. The technical platform is still ultimately an extension of the organization, which is the entity that ultimately has human goals - mostly profit, and avoiding outcomes that threaten that profit.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence Back when I had a Facebook account, I just started reporting all ads as sexually explicit. They always came back with "no it isn't" but it took a while. And I stopped seeing ads.
hutzlibu 5y ago
"or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question" Probably not worth debating this further, but I would contest that number. I lean very much towards unrestricted flow of information (and I know, there are way more radical ones around here). Not total unrestricted, with excemptions like CP, but my default is also just not look at content I find disturbing. Which means I basically avoid most of those social platforms altogether, as I indeed find most the bs posted there disturbing.
xyzzy21 5y ago
All social media companies are 100% evil. They are the "bad guys". They are pro-totalitarian, pro-collectivist. They are what has always been wrong with humanity - those who embrace evil. If you work for these companies and don't quit for simple ethical and moral reasons, YOU are part of the problem and aiding and abetting evil!

peter303 5y ago

Isaacsons new book Code Breakers about CRISPR has a couple positive chapters on Zaynor. (Isaacson interviewed Steve Jobs in his final months for the definitive biography.)

lostlogin 5y ago
I think that’s a typo and I’m after Josiah Zayner, the author of the the article here? Thanks for the connection, that book looks really interesting.

Syonyk 5y ago

> A day after YouTube took down my video, I received an email. They banned me for life. This is not only to say I could no longer upload content. I could no longer even login. We are, sadly, long since past the time that cloud providers, free content hosting, YouTube, etc, has to be considered hostile to anything outside the tech industry's consensus of what's allowed (as interpreted by their algorithms, which they like to pretend are fancy, but seem only barely smarter than keyword matching, except when they're rather dumber). Of course, due to Scale(TM), you can't actually have any humans in the loop. Unless, of course, you're well enough connected to get a bit of a rise on a tech news site, at which point a human will (usually) step in, mutter something about a mistake, fix the problem (the actual problem being the bad PR created), and go on their way. If you're posting funny reaction videos to nonsense content, sure, use YouTube. For anything serious, this is no longer a good idea (well, if you're outside the tech industry consensus for whatever that is today). But if you are even the slightest bit outside the mainstream, you probably shouldn't be using YouTube, or even the various cloud based hosting services. Your own server, in a local datacenter, perhaps fronted by CloudFront, is closer to the right answer anymore. In the rush to free services, we've handed far, far too much power to a very small set of companies, who are now happy to use that power to turn the internet into only what they want to hear.

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shadowgovt 5y ago
Plenty of serious content survives on YouTube. I'd say posting something at the intersection of fringe and dangerous can get your content canned, and unfortunately for the article author, "How to cook a COVID-19 vaccine in your kitchen" is in that category.
- liamcottam 5y ago
  I hardly trust the chicken I cook, I wouldn't trust anything biological I cooked up near me but it'd be nice to know the process in detail.

autoliteInline 5y ago

I wonder if there isn't a market for a COVID vaccine that the inevitable variants aren't resistant to. If you kept it to a small group of customers, it would maintain it's value and be worth $$$$ to them potentially.

BrianOnHN 5y ago
That's certainly the future. Mass vaccination might have made it better for costs on tptb in the past. But, if that doesn't work because a sufficient amount of the population refuses to cooperate...
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GuB-42 5y ago
AFAIK, variants are not "resistant" to vaccines, they are just different, so a vaccine targeting the previous strand will be less effective because it doesn't match perfectly. There is no better vaccine than the one for the current dominant variants. You can't really target future mutations because you don't know what the future mutations will be. You can imagine restricting the best, most current vaccine to the rich to limit escape mutations but besides the obvious ethical concerns, the virus will mutate anyways. Better vaccinate everyone with the best, because the less people infected, the less chances you give the virus to mutate.
- gweinberg 5y ago
  Current vaccines aren't optimized for the currently dominant Covid strains, they're optimized for the Covid strains that were around a year and a half ago.
pfdietz 5y ago
The problem, IMO, with the current vaccination system is not that lots of people aren't getting their shots with the available vaccines (although that's sad); the problem is how many hoops have to be jumped through to get the vaccines on the market at all. The GOP could have legitimately criticized Big Government on this if they hadn't swallowed all the stupid. Freedom doesn't mean just the freedom to decline a vaccine; it means the freedom to act without the government's permission.

phkahler 5y ago

>> monopoly speech platforms are also sloppily banning any form of science that doesn’t come from ‘ordained’ sources. It's not just that. The real message is that individuals are not able to make decisions or do things for themselves. This is why any medical treatment that doesn't involve surgery or prescriptions is thrown in with homeopathy and general quackery. It's not just companies either, individuals will look at you funny if you do anything not sanctioned by some perceived source of truth.

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heyitsguay 5y ago
Nobody has to use YouTube. There are many other video hosting/watching platforms. None of them are especially popular because they get filled with a lot of junk, because they attract the people who can't host their content on YouTube. In a way, this dynamic is an effective, natural check on moderation. If moderation primarily removes stuff that most people think is junk, then alternatives competing on reduced moderation will be junk. If moderation removes valuable stuff that lots of people want, then other platforms that host it instead will receive more traffic and legitimacy. It's kind of like the Reddit vs. Voat thing. Reddit isn't great, but Voat ended up a cesspool, because Reddit's biggest exoduses were driven by hate groups.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Nonsense. A monopoly does not conform to the rules a "normal" company does. Rumble does not compete with YouTube, because a generation of uploaders have put essentially every piece of TV, music, movies, conference proceedings, and every other form of media on YouTube. If you're wondering if something unusual is online, you would always look on YouTube first. And then stay there.
  - breckenedge 5y ago
    I disagree. You’re confusing network effects with monopoly. YouTube is not a monopoly.

jimbob45 5y ago

At the core of YouTube's censorship is the idea that people aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos they should watch. They don't know what's good for them. Whatever you may think of that idea, surely the idea that YouTube, which reduces down to a bunch of people sitting behind desks, should get to decide what others watch is questionable. That is, they think a small group of people are wiser and more intelligent than everyone and should get to curate and censor content for the majority at will.

Syonyk 5y ago
> At the core of YouTube's censorship is the idea that people aren't intelligent or wise enough to know what kinds of videos they should watch. They don't know what's good for them. I'm not sure I'd agree. I think that's putting far too much faith in them. YouTube's goal, roughly stated, is "More Hours Watched." This, in whatever form is appropriate, is pretty much the end goal of any social media sharing handwave etc platform. More eyeball-hours to sell ads to. For a while, YouTube's algorithms (which I think are almost certainly too dumb to have any idea what a video is about) pushed conspiracy theory content for the simple reason that if you can get someone watching conspiracy theory content on YouTube, they're very likely to continue watching conspiracy theory content on YouTube. Of the people who watch video 1234, 30% of them then watch dramatically more YouTube afterwards, so the more people you can show video 1234 to, the more hours will be watched - think "paperclip maximizer," not "Muahaha, we will drive people down conspiracy rabbit holes!" Of course, do this long enough, and eventually you have a problem - bad press coverage about how you're driving people down conspiracy rabbit holes. Whoops. But the problem here, from YouTube's perspective, isn't that you're driving people down conspiracy theory rabbit holes - it's the standard tech industry problem that you're getting bad press for it. Bad press is bad for hours viewed. So you fix the problem, and issue the standard tech industry appy polly loggy - "We are so, so sorry you caught us doing this and we will do the work to ensure that you don't catch us doing it in the future." I don't think YouTube particularly cares about Covid misinformation or [whatever]. They care about the bad press from being seen hosting it, which might impact people's opinion of them and reduce hours watched. To claim that the algorithms understand anything beyond the title or such is to claim a capability that has no evidence for existing.

ftrobro 5y ago

"Democratizing genetic engineering won’t suddenly unleash bioterrorism upon the world." How sure is he of that, and why? As a comparison, nuclear power has been of great utility for many countries, but I sure would not want to see it "democratized".

frazbin 5y ago
Yeah I was with him up to that point. "None of the kits we sell contain anything dangerous, nor is the average person experimenting with biology inherently dangerous. If you are trying to engineer something hazardous — like say a bat virus — you might have a problem, but the genome search space is large enough that accidentally creating a harmful organism is astronomically improbable. Access to most dangerous materials are also heavily restricted..." This sounds really sketchy to me. I can't tell if he's lying or if he really can't see any further than his own research program.. sometimes a field of research is just actually existentially dangerous for life on earth, you can't handwave it away. The possibility of biohacking as a hobby is thrilling. Trouble is, the dangers are so extreme they're difficult to even think about. Like, thought experiment: can you design a virus that kills all eukaryotic cells? Can you think of other possibilities equally terrifying? Of course stuff like that is far off, but neither you nor this guy know whether 'far off' means 10, 100, or 1000 years. We already have examples of substances that are strictly harmful to almost all life.. Dispersal of them (via the democratization of access to Chemistry) is already placing stress on the biosphere.. which again, is such a large and horrible thing it's hard to imagine or reason about. Another thing: it is still plausible that covid was a lab escape. I think the biohacker community should be incredibly humbled by that, and really think about how they'll be seen in decades to come.. we've seen cycles of technologists becoming disgraced because of the impact of their products; those cycles seem poised to accelerate. Maybe this is a good time to get on the right side of history?
- sjtindell 5y ago
  Do you see any comparison to Machine Learning? I get the impression he considers himself like a hobbyist running some models on their home GPU. Without access to server farms, there is an almost zero percent chance a home hobbyist invents an AI capable of displacing large amounts of human workers or setting off nukes on its own. AI is dangerous, but can be explored safely by a small practitioner. Perhaps these biomaterials are more sensitive though.

johnhenry 5y ago

I wonder if the video had prominent "Don't try this at home" warnings?

Rd6n6 5y ago
The whole point of his video and work is to democratize science. He sells kits to let you do genetics science at home. Ie, a disclaimer would not make sense considering his objective

amadeuspagel 5y ago

> In general, I think I understand where the criticism is coming from. Every time I post on social media about being deplatformed, banned, or silenced, someone chimes in with their own story about being banned because “big government is trying to suppress the fact that echinacea cures Covid” or whatever. Spoiler, echinacea doesn’t cure Covid, but this is the kind of crazy nonsense my work is compared to. Are you a credential person? Great, I’m a scientist with a PhD from one of the top universities in the world. I’ve worked at NASA. I’ve published a number of papers. I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've published 'a number of papers.'" Lol. > The problem isn’t my thoroughly detailed research, which I would love to have critiqued in good faith. The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.” Indeed. They are not capable of doing basic analysis of every video, or hiring a team that can. Billions of dollars aren't enough to hire a team to analyze every video on youtube.

AlbertCory 5y ago
Unfortunately, the "echinacea cures Covid" claim probably isn't true, but the CDC and YouTube people seem to have decided that ANY claims about therapeutics must be suppressed. There isn't any objective reason for this; it's purely political side-taking. As for your research: are you saying there are no forums where your work can be "critiqued in good faith"? Or just that YouTube isn't that forum? Because you're right -- it isn't.
hnuser123456 5y ago
>I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've published 'a number of papers.'" Lol. There are situations where you have someone who truly has deep merit meeting someone who believes they do and who and tries to relate to the former, but is so far disconnected that they have categorically different experience which immediately disqualifies the latter, but the general public would be unable to recognize, yet it would take significant effort for the former to explain the situation to an extent the public could understand, and at risk to the emotions and ego of the latter. Surely you can relate to this situation to some extent?

Imnimo 5y ago

I do sympathize with him, and I think his specific content should be available on YouTube, but I can also see why YouTube would want to ban him. If I'm YouTube, and I don't really understand anything about biohacking, do I really want to take the risk of promoting material about making your own vaccines? Sure, this guy's content is informative and valuable, but it wouldn't be long before you have someone less competent promoting a self-made vaccine that kills someone. If YouTube doesn't feel it has the expertise to distinguish the two, I can see why it would be prudent to just ban them all.

concordDance 5y ago
It would be good if YouTube weren't held responsible for the content they host (by both media and regulators). Its not fair to blame the transmitter for the content.
- Imnimo 5y ago
  Well, but even beyond regulators and media, if I'm a parent, do I want to let my kid watch videos on a site where they might click over to a how-to on a homemade medicine that'll kill them? And if I'm the guy running YouTube, will I sleep well at night if users of my site die after trying something that they saw on my site? I think even if I were just running YouTube in my basement and had zero media or regulator attention, I'd want to avoid that just for my own conscience.
  - concordDance 5y ago
    Would you also feel responsible as a cloud storage provider? An ISP? A phone manufacturer? An electricity provider?

daenz 5y ago

>Trust is antithetical to science. Never heard it put this way before, but I think I agree with it.

ve55 5y ago

The potential costs of systemically removing correct but controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to scientific progress in general. Sure, we remove thousands of obviously false and likely harmful posts, and there are cases to be made for why that may be good, but sometimes hidden within those thousands of posts was something that may have had a tremendously positive effect, but yet could not be separated from the noise. "The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most major tech platforms. This system seems to be helpful in some areas until it makes some mistakes, in which case the effects are catastrophic. Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work" was considered misinformation along with "a vaccine is likely to happen within a year or two", along with "this may be related to a lab leak", along with... Reality is always changing and uncertain and our policies should reflect that we do not have it all figured out, nor will we (collectively) ever. (Edit: as one commenter expressed skepticism of the mask claim, read over a link like https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_for_sending_my_son_to_school_with_medical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_... about how normal people felt about masks in the first few months of covid. It's pretty shocking and I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality just re-reading it and the top responses). Now that our infrastructure is being expanded and built out with censoring of 'incorrect' information as a top priority, I fear for how bad the mistakes we make in the future may be.

reginold 5y ago
Yeah the whole "censoring" stuff ratcheted up really fast. Kinda crazy.
- Animats 5y ago
  It's scary. Imagine the US five years from now, with Team Trump in charge of the censoring.
  - reginold 5y ago
    Banning Trump from Twitter...the pendulum will indeed swing the other way. How long do we have. The clock is ticking on open source, decentralized solutions. Nothing else is relevant.

donmcronald 5y ago

> I'm hesitant to say it worked because vaccines are complicated and we’d need further testing to confirm our results. That's the line that makes me interested enough to read more and think about what the author is saying. Misinformation doesn't typically come with a disclaimer saying it might be wrong, so that tells me the author isn't being intentionally deceiving or spreading information where they have no clue what's happening. Reading more, it actually piques my curiosity a bit. It reminds me of board level electronics repair before I saw Louis Rossmann's YouTube channel. I always thought it was impossible, but then you watch one video of him doing it and realize all the rhetoric about it being difficult, impossible, and dangerous is just that; rhetoric. I don't know what the answer is in terms of dealing with misinformation, but one thing I believe fairly strongly is that letting large, private institutions decide what's fact and what's fiction is problematic. The "facts" will always align with their business interests. I'd even say it's risky to let big companies like manufacturers get away with their lies. I KNOW electronic and appliance manufacturers are lying about the complexity of their products because I can watch a YouTube video and fix a lot of what they claim is unfixable or too dangerous to fix. Considering that, WTF am I supposed to believe when I read an article like this and someone is saying that biotech isn't as complicated as the profit driven institutions claim? There's got to be some truth to it if they behave the same as the electronics industry, right? Or am I sliding into anti-vaxxer territory? No matter what, I think it would be a great step forward if we stopped accepting deceit and disinformation as being a normal thing for large corporations and institutions to engage in. We have so many provable examples in the electronic repair industry alone that I think it's endemic. Maybe if the big companies didn't lie so much, there would be less distrust and less of an opportunity for people to spread misinformation and propaganda.

jrochkind1 5y ago
I agree that's an important bar, but intentional misinformation purveyors will learn to use that language too if necessary. It's necessary but not sufficient. Note: I dont' think this guy should have been removed from youtube, and have no reason to doubt the veracity of his story, it seems plausible and interesting.

bserge 5y ago

Everybody back to your own domains and hosting (not fucking Amazon!). If your server provider bans you, then we have a real problem.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
Then you rent a T1 line, and not from Comcast.
- slim 5y ago
  Or use framatube (torrent based video)

reginold 5y ago

What's the best video platform that supports open standards and censorship resistance? Is self-hosting the only option?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

perihelions 5y ago

Also covered by Reason (whose reporting on Zayner was likewise censored), https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-reason-video https://reason.com/2021/06/16/why-did-youtube-remove-this-re... ("Why Did YouTube Remove This Reason Video?") edit: Here's a complete transcript of the censored material, post by Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/17/youtube-removes-march-2020-reason-video-about-biohackers-working-on-diy-vaccine/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/06/17/youtube-removes-march-2...

Barrin92 5y ago

The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube. 77% of the Youtube audience in the US are 17-25 years old, it's not some niche forum for engineers and the notion that they can read scientific papers and weed out legitimate science created at home from misinformation is absurd. The correct platform for something like this is a separate forum or community where enthusiasts meet with some barrier to entry, not the mass media. I immediately question the motive of someone who promotes individual science or 'hacking' and seeks the largest mass media audience. I think the motive is much more straight forward. The author has a company that sells genetic engineering kits to people and by banning him from Youtube that impacts him financially. I personally think Biohacking and eccentric science is cool, but the appropriate audience for the kind of things he did, like treat himself with CRISPR or replace his entire microbiome to treat IBS is probably a community more self-selected than HN, not Youtube, which is mainstream television for young adults.

foerbert 5y ago
I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material. He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable. But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.
- equality_1138 5y ago
  Exactly. I read this as a much broader critique of the scientific community. As YouTube is seen as a mass media company, it's not hard to accept their content decisions. He didn't fight it. I also believe any company that markets themselves as tech industry should not be this cagey about their relationship to science. It's an ethical question not a legal one. Jumping to the legal aspect seems like a big misunderstanding of the piece. Also funny to question whether the guy is acting on financial incentives to promote his ideas. Of course he does.

carlisle_ 5y ago

My question is how can platforms ensure only “good” science is done at the scale they operate at? So many pseudosciences hide behind jargon, how much scientific education is required to delineate between the two at the velocity people want? A company might take two weeks to review and approve a flagged post, but isn’t the damage already done for how these platforms operate?

djoldman 5y ago

You don't have a right to service from a private company. Why are people so surprised and or angered by this? The law is clear: you can be denied service as long as the reason you are being denied is not your sex, religion, etc. [Protected classes]. If you go to a restaurant and they don't like you they can throw you out, and so can a hardware store, and a movie theater, etc. (Exempting the protected reasons). Find another service. This makes sense. Why should a company be forced to allow people on their property? Or use their property? They shouldn't be forced, as long as they're not discriminating.

reginold 5y ago
People are surprised and or angered by this because they aren't as clear on the law as you are. It's understandable, and they need help to better understand how it works. With that in mind, got any other services that would be replacements?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Note that even if there are no replacements, a private business can still refuse to provide you with service. It could be the only restaurant in town, and the next town might be 85 miles away and you might not have a car. Under US law, that's your problem, not the restaurant's.
- djoldman 5y ago
  You're right and I posted in frustration :( Other services... Well I think you can still view YouTube without an account. As for publishing, Vimeo?
  - reginold 5y ago
    It happens to me as well, appreciate your thoughtfulness. Vimeo is still the same deal - same weaknesses as YouTube, just less popular.
- RIMR 5y ago
  Why do people always ask "What other privately owned service I don't have control over can I use?" instead of asking "How can I make my own platform that I have control over?". Peertube, off the top of my head, would be the exact tool for the job.

tomlockwood 5y ago

> ... monopoly speech platforms are also sloppily banning any form of science that doesn’t come from ‘ordained’ sources. > ... > I’m sorry, it’s complete bullshit. Science is not something to be believed or trusted. Trust is antithetical to science. Show me the data, and let me decide for myself. Cool, agreed, but, these arguments sound identical to those made by anti-vaxxers who believe vaccines cause autism.

drumhead 5y ago

Youtube are a private company and as such can publish or not who or whatever they want. They arent obligated to publish anything. There are video platforms that however will, so he can use those instead. But I think the complaint in not rooted in Youtubes behaviour as much as it may be in the authors desire to be seen by as many people as possible. The ability to seek attention is much diminished on other platforms.

exporectomy 5y ago
Why are people still repeating that private company nonsense? Your same argument was used against civil rights back when private companies were allowed to discriminate based on race. It's an appeal to the existing law and implies you believe the law is correct by default - whatever it might be - and needs no justification.
- drumhead 5y ago
  So facebook and twitter should unban Trump?
  - concordDance 5y ago
    Yes?

fxtentacle 5y ago

Wow this guy is ignorant. Not everyone who is intelligent is a good person. In fact, some people just like to see the world burn. It might only be 0.5% of the population, but I totally get why he's investigated all the time. Selling a kit that allows bacteria to grow where they normally don't just seems like an obviously bad idea to me, even if his science ambitions are good and noble. One can learn a lot about chemistry by synthesizing explosives, but selling a diy detonation kit (even for research and learning) still seems wrong. And the potential to accidentally harm others, for example but getting genetically modified organisms on your skin and then touching stuff seems even higher here.

satisfice 5y ago
I spoke with an inventor, author of many books, and semi-famous Silicon Valley millionaire— whom I respect deeply— who told me that as a teenager he toured a Wunder Bread factory and saw how they used high heat to prevent mold or something. He decided to breed a temperature tolerant mold in his home and then see if he could spread it at the factory on another tour. That’s curiosity and science, too. Fortunately, he lost interest after having successfully bred the mold, and never carried the attack out. But you know what, I don’t want kids and sociopaths having easy access to biotech at home. Who knows what hacks will ensue that could devastate crops or economies. The OP says that is a small likelihood. The truth is he has no model that allows rational computation of the risk. The truth is he has faith. The author of the post understands the practice of science but not the sociology of trust that goes with the community of scientists. I don’t care how safe he declares his ideas to be, it’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > t’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand. Luckily we're already protected from misleading and dangerous medicine with existing law. You're falsely pretending he's doing something worse than he really is. If you're so confident in your belief, why not just use truth instead of exaggeration?

andyxor 5y ago

you cant even ask a question these days without being canceled. This is probably the most unscientific timeline we are living in now where everything is politicized and questioning the "experts" is considered sacrilege. Even Nicki Minaj is being harassed for doubting the party line https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nicki-minaj-says-shes-in-twitter-jail-will-never-use-platform-again https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nicki-minaj-says-shes...

angelzen 5y ago
During the American Golden Era people were free to take whatever position they wanted separately for each individual issue. In 2021, if someone takes position X on an issue, one is expected to take position X on all issues, or suffer social consequences for dissent. > Using a broad set of issues from the American National Election Studies, we identify rapid growth in the correlations between political attitudes from 2004 to 2016. This emergence of issue alignment is most pronounced within the economic and civil rights domains, challenging the notion that current “culture wars” are grounded in moral issues. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X2030096X?dgcid=rss_sd_all https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490...

tptacek 5y ago

Can we start with the fact that not being allowed onto a company's video platform is not a criminal penalty?

ausbah 5y ago

people need to trust science because the average person doesn't have the scientific background necessary, much less the time, to evaluate the accuracy of everything scientific they deal with - especially in the realm of medicine like it's great you want to make things accessible and help people take charge of more things in life, but I don't think most people want that - and even of those who do say they want that, few will still take the time necessary to actually understand stuff correctly which leads to the related issue that caused all the regulations and regulators we have today, people falling prey to snake oil salesman and downright harmful products in the marketplace. just look at the state of "nutritional supplaments" today to me, I think people should just be more aware of the limitations of what they can really learn given the constraints of day to day life and accept that specialization is necessary to making modern society function - thus putting their trust in the appropriate authorities when necessary but even that is a idealistic goal so idk

kongin 5y ago
> people need to trust science because the average person doesn't have the scientific background necessary, much less the time, to evaluate the accuracy of everything scientific they deal with - especially in the realm of medicine People need to be given the information they need to make informed decisions on topics that impact them. I don't have the time or inclination to figure out if the levels of heavy metal exposure for welders in the third world are dangerous or not because it doesn't impact me. I have plenty of time to figure out if any chronic disease I get has promising treatments that haven't been approved yet. For the doctor it's a matter of a 9 to 5 job, for me it's a lot more urgent. I just look at sci-hub and the citation web of any papers I find there. You're saying that the solution to having an ignorant population is to make them even more ignorant for their own good. That is the type of thinking that got us the dark ages.
concordDance 5y ago
> people falling prey to snake oil salesman and downright harmful products in the marketplace. Just have institutions enforce labelling rather than banning. If COVID vids had big banners put underneath them saying "disputed"/"unproven"/"speculative"/"known false"/"likely false" I'd be happy (as long as it includes a link to what standards they are using). Similarly, the FDA should be able to enforce accurate labelling stating what level of verification a treatment has had, not be able to ban it. If people still want to buy the snake oil (maybe they like how it feels on their skin?) let them!

sporedro 5y ago

I’m not sure YouTube is the place for this content. Google does not seem to have any intention of providing ways to verify your credentials or providing references/facts. It’s clear YouTube is not the place people should be relying on to share this type of information or really share anything knowledge based. I would love to see almost a Wikipedia version of YouTube, where videos could be submitted by anyone and facts/references could be linked at any point of the video.

jpeloquin 5y ago

Biohacking in the sense of making E. coli grow on a different substrate, like in the ODIN kit, is pretty tame and unobjectionable. Promoting the manufacture and administration of homemade vaccines, though, is human subjects research, or _very_ close to it. The current manner in which society handles human subjects research came about through reaction to specific offenses, the main ones being Nazi experiments, government studies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and common experimentation by clinicians on their patients. In reaction, definitions for human subjects research and principles to protect human subjects were established in the Nuremberg Code, Helsinki Declaration, and the Belmont Report. These principles exist not only to protect subjects but to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing. Promoting experimental (biohacked) treatments and guiding people through administering them is not compatible with the currently accepted ethical framework for protection of human subjects, _especially_ if it's done with intent of generating scientific knowledge. That, I think, is a large factor in why government and corporate entities do not wish do be seen as supporting, even tacitly, biohacking on humans. If you do biohacking on yourself quietly, no one will really care, but publishing what you learned makes it scientific research, and if it was done to a human it's human subjects research. So yes, the root of the conflict probably is a lack of acceptance by the "official science cult", but this conflict does not seem arbitrary or frivolous. Extension of current approaches to human subjects research to accommodate a public DIY biology / biohacking community may be possible but seems tricky to do without accidentally deregulating the whole field.

ramblenode 5y ago
> Promoting experimental (biohacked) treatments and guiding people through administering them is not compatible with the currently accepted ethical framework for protection of human subjects, _especially_ if it's done with intent of generating scientific knowledge. > Extension of current approaches to human subjects research to accommodate a public DIY biology / biohacking community may be possible but seems tricky to do without accidentally deregulating the whole field. This is incorrect. The ethical framework and laws surrounding human subjects research pertain to institutions, not to individuals. In the US, there is no human subjects research board for unaffiliated scientists/hobbyists that could approve or deny their research based on ethical considerations, as there is for institutions. The Belmont Report that established IRBs was specifically motivated by institutional abuse of the kind you mention, not general quackery. Marketing of quackery falls under the purview of the US FDA. There is no regulator for independent science. If you are independent and including others in your research, you are only bound by general medical ethics. See https://www.weber.edu/IRB/irb_history.html https://www.weber.edu/IRB/irb_history.html

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

I'm baffled why anyone would believe that bioterrorism isn't a possible threat. I'm also baffled why anyone would fail to understand that the practice of medicine is protected. And that vaccines require mass testing before certification and public release. Because every genome is different and it's not just about the fact that you rolled the dice on a new treatment and personally got lucky. And that people who don't have PhDs - and many who do - can easily fuck up something as powerful as gene editing in countless ways, with fatal or life changing consequences for themselves and others. Given the very poor reliability of software hacking, "biohacking" is insane, by definition. When you have a population taking horse dewormer to treat Covid, handing out biohacking tools is like taping razor blades to the limbs of people who haven't learned how to walk without falling over just because some of them want to try something a bit different. This isn't about "censorship" or victimisation, it's about common sense and the precautionary principle.

concordDance 5y ago
I guess it depends whether you think we should let adults to risky things. Most libertarians believe that we should let people do what they like provided they don't harm others, which includes experimenting on their bodies to change their gut flora or genes. I say let people have their freedom, even if they use it in risky ways you find stupid, whether that's skydiving or anal sex or changing their genes.

bumbada 5y ago

While I understand this man's position, I also understand his opponents'. If something has become crystal clear with COVID is that there are secondary effects or unintended consequences coming from biological experimentation that could affect our life greatly. In the same way as Wuhan's lab relationship with bats and COVID, there is a relationship between a laboratory that was experimenting with chimpanzees and viruses 30 kms near the origin of AIDS. Playing at home could pose existential risk to society at large. You will have the best of intentions,like probably the Wuhan people had,but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

drran 5y ago
LOL, virus escaped from "Vector" BSL4 lab in Novosibirsk, Russia, 16.09.2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7SAeNcXA8 . They were not played at home. They were not amateurs. But, as you can see at 1:04 (see soldier in background), first responders just cracked bio-laboratories and stole equipment after blast, because they are "checking building for fire" (поетажная проверка на загорание).

kloch 5y ago

The line between genius and crackpot is often very blurry. It seems most of his problems are from "guilt by association" and the rest are from doing serious work in very unconventional ways.

RattleyCooper 5y ago

>And the whole "believe science" thing? I’m sorry, it’s complete bullshit. Science is not something to be believed or trusted. Trust is antithetical to science. Show me the data, and let me decide for myself. This 1000 times. I keep having to tell people this and it's frustrating due to the fact that people who parrot "just trust the science" are acting more like religious zealots. "Trust the science" is just another way of saying "just have faith".