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The Crime of Curiosity

piratewires.com

111–120 of 223 posts

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#111
you cant even ask a question these days without being canceled.

This is probably the most unscientific timeline we are living in now where everything is politicized and questioning the "experts" is considered sacrilege.

Even Nicki Minaj is being harassed for doubting the party line https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/nicki-minaj-says-shes...

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#112

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…

It's fairly clear from a century of (a) marketing (b) psychology that people aren't really even remotely close to as intelligent or wise as they like to think they are, and almost certainly do not know what's good for them (let alone actually managing to act upon it). Humans are almost trivially manipulable (ask any advertising agency) thanks to a set of cognitive biases (and even defects) that are easily exploited (intentionally or otherwise) by all kinds of information and presentations.

You don't have to think that you're wiser or more intelligent than other people to recognize this, and to understand the danger posed by certain kinds of presentations (which includes ads, something I wish was easier to regulate without violating free speech)

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#113
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have precisely as much control as anyone familiar with US law and business practice should expect: total control. As for censorship, I'm sorry but I don't consider what even a corporation whose operation is on the scale of YT or FB does to be censorship.

It's still censorship even if it's not the government. User A posts content. User B subscribes. Entity C decides that B is not allowed to read what A has to say. C is a censor.

Technically yes, but I think this sort of argument is trying to force people to see all censorship as the same.

The type, scope, and implementation of the censorship matters. Hackernews removing spam comments is different than YouTube removing this guys account which is different from YouTube removing any video that is critical of google. And all of those are completely different from Thailand arresting anyone who criticizes the king.

If you insist on saying all of these things are the same and if you are against one of them then you have to be against all of them, then you aren't going to get much support for fighting censorship.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#114
post #4

> A day after YouTube took down my video, I received an email. They banned me for life. This is not only to say I could no longer upload content. I could no longer even login. We are, sadly, long since past the time that cloud providers, free content hosting, YouTube, etc, has to be considered hostile to anything outside the tech industry's consensus of what's allowed (as interpreted by their algorithms, which they l…

Plenty of serious content survives on YouTube. I'd say posting something at the intersection of fringe and dangerous can get your content canned, and unfortunately for the article author, "How to cook a COVID-19 vaccine in your kitchen" is in that category.

I hardly trust the chicken I cook, I wouldn't trust anything biological I cooked up near me but it'd be nice to know the process in detail.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#116

The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tel…

> Youtube has no realistic way to tell whether someone producing home-made science on youtube is a phd ex-nasa biohacker who follows best practices or just a complete quack who tries to sell dangerous fake remedies to vulnerable people. In practice the incentive to promote the latter probably far outweighs the former in number given the huge, generic audience on Youtube.

I think that the author would agree with you here- but it’s still worth calling out as something that changes if we move from a centralized content production model like PBS to distributed with moderation like YouTube.

I think that they get the “cause” wrong, attributing too much to the “cult” of mainstream science, when it seems like a logistics problem, but the effect is still that no one is able to do a deep dive on validating content. The best they can do is diagnose how far content seems to be from the mean.

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#117
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's such an arrogant, condescending statement. You're assuming that the general population is too stupid to be trusted with unfiltered information. But theories aren't dangerous. Actions are dangerous.

This is total BS. Theories are dangerous. If they weren't, nobody would ever care about them. They are dangerous because they can be inspiring, sometimes inspiring action. You can say you don't want to ban the theory, only the actions, and that's a legitimate position. It reduces you to post-facto behavior only, however (which may be just fine for you). Many societies and people within them over time have not been fi…

> The general population is not equipped with enough information or enough time to meaningfully distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit.

How certain are you that you're not part of that particular subset of the 'general population'?

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#118

Wow this guy is ignorant. Not everyone who is intelligent is a good person. In fact, some people just like to see the world burn. It might only be 0.5% of the population, but I totally get why he's investigated all the time. Selling a kit that allows bacteria to grow where they normally don't just seems like an obviously bad idea to me, even if his science ambitions are good and noble. One can learn a lot about chemi…

I spoke with an inventor, author of many books, and semi-famous Silicon Valley millionaire— whom I respect deeply— who told me that as a teenager he toured a Wunder Bread factory and saw how they used high heat to prevent mold or something. He decided to breed a temperature tolerant mold in his home and then see if he could spread it at the factory on another tour. That’s curiosity and science, too. Fortunately, he l…

> t’s not in societies interest to have “Joe’s homemade injectable health serum. You can trust ol’ NASA Joe” available at every roadside stand.

Luckily we're already protected from misleading and dangerous medicine with existing law. You're falsely pretending he's doing something worse than he really is. If you're so confident in your belief, why not just use truth instead of exaggeration?

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is total BS. Theories are dangerous. If they weren't, nobody would ever care about them. They are dangerous because they can be inspiring, sometimes inspiring action. You can say you don't want to ban the theory, only the actions, and that's a legitimate position. It reduces you to post-facto behavior only, however (which may be just fine for you). Many societies and people within them over time have not been fi…

> The general population is not equipped with enough information or enough time to meaningfully distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit. How certain are you that you're not part of that particular subset of the 'general population'?

I'm absolutely certain that I am part of the general population and share this characteristic.

[EDIT: because of the work I've done, there are a handful of areas where I think my BS detection abilities would exceed those of an average person. But that's likely true for the average person too. Overall though, we're all a lot less able to detect BS than we think. ]

Re: The Crime of Curiosity

#120

The author conflates two things. The right to biohack at home and Youtube's alleged obligation to let him broadcast his material. The first one is okay, as long as we're not talking about experiments that may be dangerous to the public. (which he seems to categorically reject for some reason, while home made bioterrorism is a real threat), the second one just doesn't follow at all. Youtube has no realistic way to tel…

I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material.

He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable.

But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.

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