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

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

#481

Post by chiefalchemist »

lopmotr wrote: post #464
pertymcpert wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those twitter outbursts you dismiss are public statements from the highest executive office. Provoking hate crimes is not something to be dismissed.

Bush caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with the Iraq war, and you're upset about some tweets?! Why do people have such a distorted view of right and wrong?

Agreed. As for why, it's obvious. It's the media. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when Trump signs off on extending the Patriot Act. A law that was renewed and expanded by the previous admin.

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

#482

Post by skronch »

soraminazuki wrote: post #475
ehsankia wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their automated system has a non-zero false-positive rate. It will from time to time accidentally take down legitimate videos, which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review, such as in this case. Yet people still jump to conclusion and assume malintent, posting headlines which imply Youtube is intentionally removing these videos. Clickbait.

I've heard enough of these machine learning buzzword bingos every week when things like this happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again.

This is akin to saying "I've heard enough of these NHTSA reports every week when car accidents happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again."

A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.

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

#483

Post by chiefalchemist »

pertymcpert wrote: post #392
chiefalchemist wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious. Twitter and media hyperbole aside how exactly is the current admin that much different than the previous? Bush #2 had fake WMDs and leveraged that to go to war. A war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and a ridiculous amount of money. The last admin bailed out Wall Street (with few concessions), re-sign…

Those twitter outbursts you dismiss are public statements from the highest executive office. Provoking hate crimes is not something to be dismissed.

I didn't dismiss them. I asked how those are so much worse than the transgressions of the previous two admins? I'd like to remind everyone that an estimated 100,000+ non-white skineed _civilians_ were killed in Iraq. Alledged hate crimes vs real war crimes.

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

#484

Post by kfrzcode »

_bxg1 wrote: post #207
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…

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.

What? "because of YouTube videos," isn't that like saying "violence happens because of video games," etc.?

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

#485

Post by joshuamorton »

aianus wrote: post #474
joshuamorton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial Since then, the understanding about asymptomatic carriers has changed. And in response, the government updated it's suggestion.

Good for them (not sarcastically). My point is that if the experts were wrong then, it’s certainly possible that some of what they are saying now is wrong too, and it should be acceptable to criticize them on YouTube and explore different possibilities and models.

There exist (clearly functional) processes to improve the scientific consensus. The government changed its recommendation. Do you think they were convinced by a YouTube videos or perhaps did some other process cause then to amend their recommendations?

If so, why not steer people toward that process, especially when the harm of wearing a mask is low, while the harm oh reopening the economy due to a lack of understanding the covid dangers is much greater?

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

#486

Post by joshuamorton »

pchristensen wrote: post #455
contravariant wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch. Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all dec…

The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed…

But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?

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

#487

Post by lordlic »

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.

YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.

You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.

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

#488

Post by covidSurvivor19 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #207
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…

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.

Let's not forget why idea censorship exists. We are ruled by those we are not allowed to criticized. Even the guys setting fire to cell towers, can we believe that a video is going to convince anyone reasonable of actually doing it? Do you yourself feel tempted?

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

#489

Post by 2019-nCoV »

modriano wrote: post #447
2019-nCoV wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with relying on the existing legal foundation? Arrest them for arson, if and when they decide to ravage a cell tower. Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?

Nationally, the clearance rate for arson is typically under 23%, meaning the vast majority of arsonists get away with it. In general, clearance rates are pretty bad across most crimes. The homicide clearance rate is typically below 62%, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings is typically below 55%, clearance rates for reported rape is typically below 40%, clearance rates for motor vehicle theft is typically below 20…

> If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.

Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.

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

#490

Post by t-writescode »

joefourier wrote: post #382
majewsky wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same. Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day). If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And th…

Video hosting scalability is not the problem it was if you use a technology like Webtorrent, allowing peer-to-peer distribution of your video files. See PeerTube for a relatively easy platform for your private video hosting. Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly…

I'm not a lawyer; but, relentlessly downloading and then assisting in the distribution of content I've not personally validated sounds like a legal minefield filled mostly with mines and very little green space.
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