The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire

Well I will not pretend that I am the one to make a good case for it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to debate you about it.

I never said it was equivalent to violence. However, if it leads to violence, speech is absolutely dangerous. See murder cases where people are convinced to kill others under false pretenses. Or they are just talked into doing it by a charismatic individual. This sort of speech is actually already illegal. I'm sure it's not difficult for you to imagine speech that leads slightly indirectly to violence. That isn't necessarily the type of speech we are discussing here, I just thought I'd point out the extreme case where we already acknowledge the power of speech.

As you have heard said and I'm sure will disagree with, the internet has lowered the bar to attaining a widespread audience. It used to be that you would have to be eloquent enough and thoughtful enough to throw your ideas into a coherent book, show, essay, or whatever. And there would be people vetting your material for quality before deciding it should go before an audience.

Obviously, that doesn't stop all the bullshit (and actually leads to other bullshit), but having a higher barrier to information exchange meant that content was much more likely to vetted by one or more people who had some critical thinking skills. As a publisher, you couldn't just put out anything because it would cost you something. Now, any half baked idea you have you can put it out there, and similarly minded people who maybe formed the same sorts of half baked ideas or are just incapable of vetting the truth for themselves can find each other and form large groups of people who all now believe the same bullshit. This was always possible with word of mouth, but the internet is a much more effective medium for bullshit and allows it to be much more viral and widespread in nature.

The vast majority of widely available "information" out there is no longer authored by experts, thanks to the internet. It's authored by people who mistake their layperson knowledge as expert knowledge, or believe that their "common sense" is enough to tell them how the world works. The audience can now choose what "information" to consume and doesn't have to believe the unpleasant things experts say or the understand the complicated stuff if they don't want to. They can just pick and choose whatever simple or comfortable truths they desire.

As for evidence, most hard social and political problems are impossible to agree on. That problem is exacerbated by the type of misinformation we're talking about here, because it's even harder to agree on what the facts are. For example, somehow we are still arguing about global warming despite mountains of evidence. The the same thing happened with smoking and lung cancer. I don't have any evidence to share with you, but I'm sure that if I did you'd find a way to dismiss it with your own.

I'm confident that you have heard similar reasoning before.

> Correct. That's why I said the difference is intent. You have not contradicted that.

You are mistaken. The earnest falsehood can cause great damage, and the truth - even when spoken by someone of ill intent - is still important. Your standard of intent is simply not sufficient.

So called "hateful" people are sometimes necessary to break the stranglehold bad ideas have on society. Socrates was executed for "corrupting the youth".

> Congratulations. I'm not concerned with weaponized disinformation in your social circle.

The point here is that YouTube (or any tech platform) is not in a position to implement any reasonable standard at scale. Even if your standard of intent were reasonable (it's not) intent doesn't just vary between people, intent can vary within a person over the course of a single conversation! And a person's intent can also be mixed. There is no way any of these platforms can capture that level of nuance in human social interaction.

> Good for you. If everyone were as intelligent and enlightened as you are, then the world would operate a lot more smoothly.

True, but beside the point.

I want to be very clear about this. If you value democracy in any way, you must support the right for everyone to make up their own mind. That is because, unless you have that right, you do not have a democracy. All you have is the oligarchy of the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion.

If they were truly right, you could weigh the evidence they present and you would be convinced it is correct because they are so smart and compelling. Then you would make the decision that their evidence suggests. There would be no need to cede any authority to them, they should be able to convince you on the merits of their arguments.

Do you sincerely think that a person that manages to be elected is stupid?

An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.

> Roundup (aka glyphosate) seems to be pretty safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Glyphosate_alone

If you're concerned about the safety of glyphosate formulations you may be interested to learn that the testing and regulatory process appears to have been captured. [0] [1]

> Why would there be?

Are you asking why there would be a difference between a topical application that could be rinsed off and a substance that is produced by the plant and is inside the plant material itself?

> But the scope and extent of the effects are not known.

Indeed, this is why the precautionary principle is at play here.

> Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied.

They've been studied enough to suggest that they are potentially hazardous depending on the dose and context.

> With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).

That's not a valid interpretation of the precautionary principle.

> So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?

I haven't suggested that, of course mutations are not "bad", they just are. I was responding to your placement of GE products in opposition to mutations. No, I wouldn't stop evolution if I could, but that's interesting and I wonder if a population with no mutations would have significantly lower cancer rates. Its an interesting thought experiment.

> It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.

There are other ways to control competitor organisms besides herbicide and there are people who use conventional herbicide that don't use GMOs (and so they don't use as much herbicide). Just so you know, most farmers are not letting weeds grow out of control on their fields :)

> This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use.

Are you suggesting that it would be better to place limits on how much / how often herbicide could be applied to a field? Perhaps so but I'm not convinced that the laws in this case could be finely tuned enough to achieve the effect without creating a rule that was either too strict or too lenient (or perhaps both at once) for a large percentage of farmers. Without a selective herbicide/crop system, farmers have to be careful about when and how much herbicide they apply, lest they kill their own crops. With a selective herbicide/crop system, they can just cover the field in herbicide, resulting in substantially greater application amounts. Your argument that application amounts could be specified by law leaves me unconvinced that the concern with the selective systems is misplaced.

> It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs.

Its likely that ecosystem damage is unavoidable with agriculture and so we prefer a minimalist approach, rather than meeting some arbitrary threshold value (which could only be estimated on the basis of imperfect knowledge anyway).

> Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.

I know some farmers who would be very happy if the same level of herbicide resistance exhibited by GMO crops was available in a non-GMO product. I'm sure its possible, perhaps we will see this someday.

[0] https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/assets/Monsanto%20Roundup%20p...

[1] https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-round...