The Crime of Curiosity • Hacker News Board

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#21

Post by Syonyk » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #11

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 a…

> 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.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#22

Post by Imnimo » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#23

Post by hnuser123456 » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #16

> 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 cr…

>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?

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#24

Post by daenz » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

>Trust is antithetical to science.

Never heard it put this way before, but I think I agree with it.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#25

Post by swayvil » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #9

>> 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…

My body my choice.

No, you're not qualified to make that choice.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#26

Post by frazbin » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

ftrobro wrote: post #13

"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".

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?

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#27

Post by ve55 » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

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_... 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.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#28

Post by bserge » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

ftrobro wrote: post #13

"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".

A motivated party can deploy and detonate several bombs in places with a lot of people any day, Covid rules notwithstanding.

It's laughably/terrifyingly easy, the hardest part is building or buying the bombs.

But you don't see it done regularly at all.

Granted, a single nuclear or bio attack would affect way more people.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#29

Post by sjtindell » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

frazbin wrote: post #26

ftrobro wrote: post #13

"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".

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 materia…

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.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#30

Post by donmcronald » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

> 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.