Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 596 posts

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#191

Post by [deleted] »

root_axis wrote: post #109
acituan wrote: post #51

I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web se…

> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#192

Post by restingrobot »

alabaster_punt wrote: post #53
DiffEq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is so dangerous about it? Perhaps you need to consult a dictionary as to what danger really is. I don't know these people that made the video and I don't subscribe to magic crystals or whatever they are pushing/saying but I do know what Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson from Imperial college created in his flawed modeling - a world wide panic. That is what has been dangerous. Google is a private company I suppose…

What's dangerous about it is that it's encouraging people to demand that their government enact policies that will lead to unnecessary deaths. Neil Ferguson's model was not flawed (at least, not in a significant way that would invalidate its conclusions)

Are you serious? The orginally predicted death number was over 250,000 in Britain. How do you explain the numbers in Sweden which had a much different policy compared UK? Yes Sweden has a higher mortality/million pop rate, but estimates are showing that the number of people dying in UK from non-covid-19 health issues as a result of covid-19, (not going to hospital or getting treatment), would put those numbers on par.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#193

Post by macinjosh »

okreallywtf wrote: post #181

I think that we often get hung up on the what-ifs of censorship while misinformation is doing damage right this second. The problem is that people don't evaluate 2 narratives equally based on the information in them. If that was the case, you would just have to make sure that for every bogus report there is a reliable report, but once misinformation takes hold it takes a lot more than that to dislodge. The analogy I…

IMHO, this is an incredibly authoritarian point of view. It makes the assumption that the content being censored or banned is both wrong and damaging. I am not only referring to this specific case, but the interviewee here is ostensibly someone of expertise being a professor of medicine. That doesn't mean what they say is correct but at the very least they have direct knowledge of the topic.

In the grand scheme of things, there isn't much that is universally agreed upon even in professional/academic circles.

I would submit that limiting discussion because it doesn't fit the most wideley accepted or palatable narrative is a magnitude more dangerous than instead relying on people to take in all sides and decide for themselves.

Recall how Galileo Galilei was treated. History can and does repeat itself.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#194

Post by restingrobot »

takeda wrote: post #177
DiffEq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like we don't need to worry about that...government does all on its own... https://nypost.com/2020/04/28/more-blood-on-gov-cuomos-hands...

So this is your source? An opinion piece in a right leaning columnist in a biased NY Post, where author couldn't even help himself but include other unrelated tidbits, like how is Joe Biden and Tara Reade related to corona virus? There's nothing there to verify that even the characters in the story are real not to mention the story.

LOL this is the first I've ever heard of a "right leaning columnist" at the NY Post, opinion or not.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#195

Post by belltaco »

DiffEq wrote: post #78
alabaster_punt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a specific reason to believe that the model resulted in an incorrect conclusion, feel free to share it, instead of casting aspersions with cryptic nothings.

The model said if we don't lock things down China-style millions will die. But we see now from Sweden it was not true. See top graph: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-c... Also Neil's other predictions have been completely wrong on the Swine Flu and Bird flu. Why this "expert in his field" is still listened to is a mystery to me.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/sweden-highest-deat...

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#196

Post by mc32 »

acituan wrote: post #51

I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web se…

In my view from the ten minutes I watched he didn’t state anything any more off base than the WHO has over the time the pandemic has been spreading. There is uncertainty and we’re yet to understand it thoroughly.

Given that, I think this is gross overreach by YT in establishing narrative. What happens if their management becomes a bunch of anti-vaxxers, do they get to set the tone?

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#197

Post by belltaco »

thebean11 wrote: post #168
Rebelgecko wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about that first graph on the page, I think that it is not very helpful. Comparing total number of deaths can be misleading, especially for small countries like Sweden. If my state had a Coronavirus death rate as high as Sweden's 15,000 more people would be dead. Still not "millions", but it wouldn't be an ideal outcome.

Weren't his projections for deaths assuming we did a lockdown also much higher than the actual numbers?

Some other comment here said it was the other way around,they predicted 20k deaths in the UK with a lockdown and the death toll is 36,000.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#198

Post by picometer »

root_axis wrote: post #109
acituan wrote: post #51

I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web se…

> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions…

The essential, underlying problem here is that YouTube is a corporate product, just as you say, and yet still has a major influence on the population's aggregate belief, due to its scale of adoption. This is an emergent phenomenon, not a narrative.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#199

Post by ska »

ska wrote: post #66
aianus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask? https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/national-directive-on-w...

Those Canadian experts haven't been telling you not to wear a mask, have they? I can't find evidence of that - I just find them saying they don't have scientific evidence (yet) that wearing masks prophetically is necessary. Which is a very different thing. Have you seen different statements?

Hmmm, prophetically should have been prophylactically - hope that was obvious.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#200

Post by wrsh07 »

mchusma wrote: post #5

I don't really care the content at all, but I really wish these platforms took the "phone company" approach, in which they considered themselves neutral carriers of information. In the US, I don't know an obvious issue besides legislative change to enforce this. However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.

I disagree

I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)

https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/

These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers

As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.

Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.

Post reply on HN