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> Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site who deny the scientific consensus on climate change, echoing a policy already in place at Google.

by qiskit 4y ago

> Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site who deny the scientific consensus on climate change, echoing a policy already in place at Google. Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. And when you mix politics with science, you get social darwinism/scientific racism/etc. > Twitter said it would provide more information in the coming months on how it plans to provide “reliable, authoritative context to the climate conversations” its users engage in, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The U.N.-backed science panel’s reports on the causes and effects of climate change provide the basis for international negotiations to curb climate change. The good old authoritarian, I mean authoritative sources. It's amazing how the entire establishment political/media/tech/etc all rallied around "authoritative sources". It's almost like someone flipped a switch and it's become a national mantra. "Authoritative sources", "authoritative sources", "authoritative sources". A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. Seems very trustworthy to me.

olddustytrail 4y ago
To address your last sentence: yes, if you can get those five countries to agree on anything, it's probably trustworthy.
- bequanna 4y ago
  If you can get those five countries to agree on anything, the lobbyists/politicians running those countries have found some way to benefit from that message.
- stretchwithme 4y ago
  Unfortunately, two of those countries aren't allowed to vote so we don't know what they agree on.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    Which two countries would those be?
  - jokethrowaway 4y ago
    Like voting changes much. Countries are all basically oligarchies, some of them have extra steps (a sprinkle of democracy, a pound of corruption) so people won't look up from their iPhone and feel superior to those backwards goat farmers with a dictator and no potable water. Still, I'm glad to see you enjoy seeing your 1/xxxM representation.
cardy31 4y ago
Yeah they rallied around it since the alternative is to just put everyone on an equal platform. Gatekeeping is good in areas like climate science where certain groups have a large incentive to spew demonstrably false information about it.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Gatekeeping is not good, providing education and insight is good. If you gatekeep then you are essentially advocating for propaganda because that is how it will be used and has been used.
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    That might work when you’re not talking about advertising. The vested interests in the status quo are the most profitable organizations in the world. How can the average citizen or “save the climate group” compete?
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Corruption won't go away through censorship. It will only make it worse. The best solution IMO is for truth and transparency and to have honest leaders shift focus to education.
- _3u10 4y ago
  What group doesn’t have a vested interest to spew demonstrably false information about it? Climate change isn’t science it’s mostly politics around preserving or not preserving the temperatures and sea levels from when the steam engine was invented. Like I believe the climate is changing, but we should do almost nothing about it. That said I don’t own any property within 7 feet of sea level so I don’t really give a shit if the people who do lose a little bit of their waterfront property.
  - throwaway15908 4y ago
    Consider it like this. Sustainability is _only_ a waste management system that enables recycling rates of 90% or higher (which is damn hard). CO2 is also just one of many waste products, we totally dont care about, but _must_ to sustain our civilisation. No politics, just input/output, same goal.
ChrisLomont 4y ago
Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. When the experts on a topic don't have consensus, we say the science is undecided. When they have consensus, we call that science settled. And for the science to change under new evidence, again the consensus of experts is required, otherwise the new change remains on the fringe.
- User23 4y ago
  > Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. This is scientistry, not science. Science works on observation and experiment. In a perfect world perhaps consensus would be established scientifically, but that’s observably at odds with the history of science.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    That's like saying that software engineering is about typing. Observations and experiments are low-level activities you perform while doing science. Actual science works on higher levels. Convincing yourself that your ideas are right is a low bar. The key part of doing science is convincing yourself that your ideas are wrong. It's about telling the difference between actually discovering something new and making mistakes in experiments and reasoning. If you fail to convince yourself, you ask others to convince you that your ideas are wrong. If they also fail, you are starting to build a consensus that maybe you have actually discovered something. Believing in something that contradicts the consensus is politics. Building a consensus among experts who are skeptical but open to new ideas is science.
    - User23 4y ago
      Thanks for the clear demonstration that the use of analogy is no substitute for reason. The problem is one of confusion. There are at least three distinct things that we call science. Primus, the social enterprise itself. This is where “consensus” applies. Secundus, the method for understanding the rules governing the system of the world. This is where what you call “low level” activities are. Tertius, the body of accepted knowledge that’s been ascertained. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily follow from the scientific method. Sometimes it instead follows from the needs of the social enterprise of science, which we rather clumsily call politics. It’s only by clearly and distinctly considering these three concepts that we can avoid frankly intellectually crippling confusion.
systemvoltage 4y ago
I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3 letter agencies and authority in general. Remember the 90's? That's what classical liberals did. Current progressive movement is completely unhinged and looking more like CCP, sorry to say. It is going to backfire massively.
- cryptica 4y ago
  Of course it will backfire. Progressives these days have no real values aside from extracting as much money as possible from governments and citizens without providing any value in return. Once this strategy stops working, they will turn on each other. Their loyalty to each other is fake, just like everything else in their lives. Everything they say and do is founded on lies; that's why they depend so much on each other for support and reinforcement. It's a religion. The only way they can maintain their nonsensical ideologies is through repeated, mutual brainwashing.
- magicalist 4y ago
  > I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3 letter agencies and authority in general. Neither the IPCC nor the UN are three letter agencies
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
- 8note 4y ago
  The democratic institutions are broken, and the leaders are unwilling to put in fixes, and the electorate can't hold them to account without them Preserving voting rights, reducing gerrymandering, and limiting the filibuster to be an infrequent tool have no real priority. The old guard of bad 3 letter agencies have some insulation against that, making them the old evil instead of the new
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
You're totally right. Any day now we're going to discover the secret to alchemy and then those folks in Flint will have faucets full of gold.
staticassertion 4y ago
"science isn't supposed to work on consensus" lol yes, let's throw out the concept of peer review, all science is equal now everyone
- mlindner 4y ago
  More often than not peer review acts as gatekeeping rather than actual analysis of the data and methods. The people who do peer review are often those with institutional political power rather than proper "peers".
  - VerminOctopus1 4y ago
    This is such a bizarre take. Have you gone through the peer review process for a scientific paper? I have, and fairly reliably I’ve had experts in the field review the content and provide strong, thoughtful feedback. Maybe your particular subject field is more prone to politicking than mine? It’s hard for me to think of peer review as anything other than absolutely essential.
  - Kye 4y ago
    Does it? Someone should do a study and...huh wait a minute. That's quite a claim to make, and impossible to falsify in the universe it posits.
- shoulderfake 4y ago
jmull 4y ago
> Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. The ads are politics, not science. This is a case of twitter's political stance being at odds with some of their potential advertisers. I don't see why advertisers should have some right here that overrides twitter's. > authoritarian If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing twitter's right to do this.
- goodluckchuck 4y ago
  No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. They’re saying it’s a bad policy and Twitter should choose to allow content it disagrees with. Silencing others is not Liberty.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Except it’s well within their rights to do this. They’re not beholden to be the platform that furthers false things like climate change denial
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      >> No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. > Except it’s well within their rights to do this. Swing and a miss.
    - loceng 4y ago
      That's a very difficult thing to moderate, to manage, and from personal experience Twitter doesn't even enforce their existing rules accurately. For example, will posts denying the hysteria of climate change - let's say the ideology of climate change activism that has formed, perhaps fuelled by for-profit industrial complexes, perhaps also leveraged by some governments wanting to use fear to manufacture consent toward control - be ban on Twitter, will that be considered denial if they point out things like some parts of the world actually cooling - and "heat deaths" in those areas are actually going down? Climate change hysteria media seems to only want to report the increasing heat deaths annually, but not deducting the reduced deaths from the cooling areas. Now I don't even know for 100% if the above is true, or how true it is, as I haven't had a chance to dive into some of the leaders of that effort who're supposedly trying to have a grounded, balanced conversation on climate - referencing data, etc. An organization or individual claiming they can be or are an arbiter of truth is a recipe for disaster; what New Zealand Prime Minister once actually said comes to mind, that if you hear something not from government (about COVID, the pandemic) then it's not true.
magicalist 4y ago
> A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. Seems very trustworthy to me. A solid philosophy of science is difficult to live up to in the real world, but I guarantee that "I don't know anything about the IPCC but I see it's organized through the UN so I know enough to dismiss it" is not it.
- istinetz 4y ago
  Why not? It seems obvious to me that a UN committee will be under a lot of political pressure to bend the truth, where it is in conflict with politics. And I have seen many, many examples of committees bending the truth. Why is this one different?
alkonaut 4y ago
> Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. This was Twitter, not Nature or ArXiv. This is sad, but good. It’s sad that this is the least bad of two bad alternatives.
threatofrain 4y ago
Science policy is different from science research, and similarly, medical policy is different from medical research. Policy is the intersection of technical craft and politics, and it ought be consensus-oriented. That doctors almost entirely practice consensus-based medicine does not mean that medical research is halted, but it does mean that not all clinics are labs, and thus medical research is not advancing at peak speed.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  That's exactly how you get people to buy statins for 50 years because the consensus is that cholesterol should be a certain number. Or covid vaccines for everyone x3. And I can't wait to see what taxes we'll need to raise to fight climate change. If science and profits wouldn't have a chance to mix in there would be value in a shared policy. In the real world, you'd better pay a good doctor for advice (enough to offset big pharma) and hope that policy being enforced by "the people's" government won't break your bank too much.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by qiskit 4y ago

olddustytrail 4y ago

To address your last sentence: yes, if you can get those five countries to agree on anything, it's probably trustworthy.

bequanna 4y ago
If you can get those five countries to agree on anything, the lobbyists/politicians running those countries have found some way to benefit from that message.
stretchwithme 4y ago
Unfortunately, two of those countries aren't allowed to vote so we don't know what they agree on.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  Which two countries would those be?
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Like voting changes much. Countries are all basically oligarchies, some of them have extra steps (a sprinkle of democracy, a pound of corruption) so people won't look up from their iPhone and feel superior to those backwards goat farmers with a dictator and no potable water. Still, I'm glad to see you enjoy seeing your 1/xxxM representation.

cardy31 4y ago

Yeah they rallied around it since the alternative is to just put everyone on an equal platform. Gatekeeping is good in areas like climate science where certain groups have a large incentive to spew demonstrably false information about it.

encryptluks2 4y ago
Gatekeeping is not good, providing education and insight is good. If you gatekeep then you are essentially advocating for propaganda because that is how it will be used and has been used.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  That might work when you’re not talking about advertising. The vested interests in the status quo are the most profitable organizations in the world. How can the average citizen or “save the climate group” compete?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Corruption won't go away through censorship. It will only make it worse. The best solution IMO is for truth and transparency and to have honest leaders shift focus to education.
_3u10 4y ago
What group doesn’t have a vested interest to spew demonstrably false information about it? Climate change isn’t science it’s mostly politics around preserving or not preserving the temperatures and sea levels from when the steam engine was invented. Like I believe the climate is changing, but we should do almost nothing about it. That said I don’t own any property within 7 feet of sea level so I don’t really give a shit if the people who do lose a little bit of their waterfront property.
- throwaway15908 4y ago
  Consider it like this. Sustainability is _only_ a waste management system that enables recycling rates of 90% or higher (which is damn hard). CO2 is also just one of many waste products, we totally dont care about, but _must_ to sustain our civilisation. No politics, just input/output, same goal.

ChrisLomont 4y ago

Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. When the experts on a topic don't have consensus, we say the science is undecided. When they have consensus, we call that science settled. And for the science to change under new evidence, again the consensus of experts is required, otherwise the new change remains on the fringe.

User23 4y ago
> Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. This is scientistry, not science. Science works on observation and experiment. In a perfect world perhaps consensus would be established scientifically, but that’s observably at odds with the history of science.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  That's like saying that software engineering is about typing. Observations and experiments are low-level activities you perform while doing science. Actual science works on higher levels. Convincing yourself that your ideas are right is a low bar. The key part of doing science is convincing yourself that your ideas are wrong. It's about telling the difference between actually discovering something new and making mistakes in experiments and reasoning. If you fail to convince yourself, you ask others to convince you that your ideas are wrong. If they also fail, you are starting to build a consensus that maybe you have actually discovered something. Believing in something that contradicts the consensus is politics. Building a consensus among experts who are skeptical but open to new ideas is science.
  - User23 4y ago
    Thanks for the clear demonstration that the use of analogy is no substitute for reason. The problem is one of confusion. There are at least three distinct things that we call science. Primus, the social enterprise itself. This is where “consensus” applies. Secundus, the method for understanding the rules governing the system of the world. This is where what you call “low level” activities are. Tertius, the body of accepted knowledge that’s been ascertained. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily follow from the scientific method. Sometimes it instead follows from the needs of the social enterprise of science, which we rather clumsily call politics. It’s only by clearly and distinctly considering these three concepts that we can avoid frankly intellectually crippling confusion.

systemvoltage 4y ago

I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3 letter agencies and authority in general. Remember the 90's? That's what classical liberals did. Current progressive movement is completely unhinged and looking more like CCP, sorry to say. It is going to backfire massively.

cryptica 4y ago
Of course it will backfire. Progressives these days have no real values aside from extracting as much money as possible from governments and citizens without providing any value in return. Once this strategy stops working, they will turn on each other. Their loyalty to each other is fake, just like everything else in their lives. Everything they say and do is founded on lies; that's why they depend so much on each other for support and reinforcement. It's a religion. The only way they can maintain their nonsensical ideologies is through repeated, mutual brainwashing.
magicalist 4y ago
> I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3 letter agencies and authority in general. Neither the IPCC nor the UN are three letter agencies
- systemvoltage 4y ago
8note 4y ago
The democratic institutions are broken, and the leaders are unwilling to put in fixes, and the electorate can't hold them to account without them Preserving voting rights, reducing gerrymandering, and limiting the filibuster to be an infrequent tool have no real priority. The old guard of bad 3 letter agencies have some insulation against that, making them the old evil instead of the new
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

You're totally right. Any day now we're going to discover the secret to alchemy and then those folks in Flint will have faucets full of gold.

staticassertion 4y ago

"science isn't supposed to work on consensus" lol yes, let's throw out the concept of peer review, all science is equal now everyone

mlindner 4y ago
More often than not peer review acts as gatekeeping rather than actual analysis of the data and methods. The people who do peer review are often those with institutional political power rather than proper "peers".
- VerminOctopus1 4y ago
  This is such a bizarre take. Have you gone through the peer review process for a scientific paper? I have, and fairly reliably I’ve had experts in the field review the content and provide strong, thoughtful feedback. Maybe your particular subject field is more prone to politicking than mine? It’s hard for me to think of peer review as anything other than absolutely essential.
- Kye 4y ago
  Does it? Someone should do a study and...huh wait a minute. That's quite a claim to make, and impossible to falsify in the universe it posits.
shoulderfake 4y ago

jmull 4y ago

> Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. The ads are politics, not science. This is a case of twitter's political stance being at odds with some of their potential advertisers. I don't see why advertisers should have some right here that overrides twitter's. > authoritarian If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing twitter's right to do this.

goodluckchuck 4y ago
No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. They’re saying it’s a bad policy and Twitter should choose to allow content it disagrees with. Silencing others is not Liberty.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Except it’s well within their rights to do this. They’re not beholden to be the platform that furthers false things like climate change denial
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    >> No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. > Except it’s well within their rights to do this. Swing and a miss.
  - loceng 4y ago
    That's a very difficult thing to moderate, to manage, and from personal experience Twitter doesn't even enforce their existing rules accurately. For example, will posts denying the hysteria of climate change - let's say the ideology of climate change activism that has formed, perhaps fuelled by for-profit industrial complexes, perhaps also leveraged by some governments wanting to use fear to manufacture consent toward control - be ban on Twitter, will that be considered denial if they point out things like some parts of the world actually cooling - and "heat deaths" in those areas are actually going down? Climate change hysteria media seems to only want to report the increasing heat deaths annually, but not deducting the reduced deaths from the cooling areas. Now I don't even know for 100% if the above is true, or how true it is, as I haven't had a chance to dive into some of the leaders of that effort who're supposedly trying to have a grounded, balanced conversation on climate - referencing data, etc. An organization or individual claiming they can be or are an arbiter of truth is a recipe for disaster; what New Zealand Prime Minister once actually said comes to mind, that if you hear something not from government (about COVID, the pandemic) then it's not true.

magicalist 4y ago

> A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. Seems very trustworthy to me. A solid philosophy of science is difficult to live up to in the real world, but I guarantee that "I don't know anything about the IPCC but I see it's organized through the UN so I know enough to dismiss it" is not it.

istinetz 4y ago
Why not? It seems obvious to me that a UN committee will be under a lot of political pressure to bend the truth, where it is in conflict with politics. And I have seen many, many examples of committees bending the truth. Why is this one different?

alkonaut 4y ago

> Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. This was Twitter, not Nature or ArXiv. This is sad, but good. It’s sad that this is the least bad of two bad alternatives.

threatofrain 4y ago

Science policy is different from science research, and similarly, medical policy is different from medical research. Policy is the intersection of technical craft and politics, and it ought be consensus-oriented. That doctors almost entirely practice consensus-based medicine does not mean that medical research is halted, but it does mean that not all clinics are labs, and thus medical research is not advancing at peak speed.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
That's exactly how you get people to buy statins for 50 years because the consensus is that cholesterol should be a certain number. Or covid vaccines for everyone x3. And I can't wait to see what taxes we'll need to raise to fight climate change. If science and profits wouldn't have a chance to mix in there would be value in a shared policy. In the real world, you'd better pay a good doctor for advice (enough to offset big pharma) and hope that policy being enforced by "the people's" government won't break your bank too much.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]