The Crime of Curiosity

Post by nix0n » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

ssijak wrote: post #2

I don't understand this social platforms. Covid stuff and fake news aside, I reported maybe 20 times obvious scam videos, or posts with extreme hatred and threats of violence against a group of people and similar stuff where 99.99999% of us would agree that it should be removed without question, and only once they did remove it. All the other times I get a message that they reviewed my complaint, that it does not go…

Post by hnisfullofshit » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #49

ve55 wrote: post #27

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 separat…

>"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. I think the keyword that, in my mind, justifies the censorship here is "on most major tech platforms". Nobody is banning the discussion of these ideas in academic journals or HN or other places where curious people can go to discuss things - it's just making sure un…

Post by hnisfullofshit » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

reginold wrote: post #53

hnisfullofshit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HackerNews is notorious for censoring anything that falls outside its groupthink or threatens a portfolio company. It's actually one of the more aggressive censors on the internet. Case in point from this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28558254 There is no free speech here.

Curious to hear more about this. Is censorship "removal" or simply not getting votes? I've seen this concept generally addressed here before as "we don't censor, people just vote this way"

Post by gweinberg » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #18

autoliteInline wrote: post #5

I wonder if there isn't a market for a COVID vaccine that the inevitable variants aren't resistant to. If you kept it to a small group of customers, it would maintain it's value and be worth $$$$ to them potentially.

AFAIK, variants are not "resistant" to vaccines, they are just different, so a vaccine targeting the previous strand will be less effective because it doesn't match perfectly. There is no better vaccine than the one for the current dominant variants. You can't really target future mutations because you don't know what the future mutations will be. You can imagine restricting the best, most current vaccine to the rich…

Post by nradov » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #33

ve55 wrote: post #27

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 separat…

> The potential costs of systemically removing correct but controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to scientific progress in general. I fall pretty strongly on the side of combatting misinformation, but I disagree with outright removal of content. I think it should be flagged as misinformation, but left available. Put another way, I'm a fan of labelling, not censoring. I want transparency. "Our misinfo…