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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#671

Post by dang »

superflit2 wrote: post #500
reducesuffering wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not who Elon was referring to. And the Economist is primarily owned by the Italian Agnelli family, not jewish people. I'll leave it for you to decide how many other things it gets wrong...

From google ``` Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild (21%), Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders. ```

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting antisemitic tropes (not allowed here) and for using HN primarily for ideological battle (also not allowed).

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#672

Post by deltree7 »

garethrowlands wrote: post #670
deltree7 wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims need extra-ordinary proof. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years, You are making the claim of their extinct in the next 50 years. The burden of proof is on you to prove that. If you make the claim that Earth will stop spinning tomorrow, you have to produce the proof, not me

OP is not making the claim that Earth will stop spinning tomorrow though. Nor did OP mention 50 years. Nor does OP need to prove global warning, since many others have done that. Not that you'd read it but here's a readable summary of the evidence, https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...

Global Warming by 2-3 degress doesn't imply human extinction (or even the leading cause of deaths).

That is an incredible lazy, naive and dumb take on effects of Climate Change. Human ingenuity and technology and accumulated capital of nearly $200 Trillion can easily scale mitigating solutions when it really comes to it.

Unfortunately, Policy makers never take into account the dynamic, complex systems and use linear graphs done by low-paid interns to predict economic and human systems.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#673

Post by dang »

webdoodle wrote: post #634
dang wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It's much too predictable and tedious. I realize this is begging for an "aha! the elites are proving the point!" response—but really no, we just don't want threads to clog up with low-information, high-indignation rhetoric. If you want to be all non-elitey within those params, have at it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.c…

Detaching a thread, that's new (to me). I guess it's better than all out censorship, but not much better than Reddit collapsing threads that get downvoted by bots. I'm sorry if my meager comment became work for you, however you do realize you are modding a 'hacker' forum, where social engineering is the purest and earliest form of 'hacking'? Consider that most of the original 'hackers' are/were looking for social equ…

I feel for your plight, but our first duty is to try to prevent this place from degenerating—or at least to stave that off as long as possible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and it's quite clear that ideological wailing is one of the factors that most needs to be dampened if we're to achieve that. The best I can offer you is that the opposing wailings are just as dampened.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#674

Post by clusterfish »

ninkendo wrote: post #494
clusterfish wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't give a shit because you're happy to see Facebook silence opinions you don't want to hear. What, you think a tech monopoly will always be on your side? Or that someone will care when news that YOU care about will be censored / defeated / fake fact checked? You're just a propaganda cog with such an attitude, no better than dumb antivaxers who don't care about facts either.

I think you may have stopped reading my comment after the beginning. In my last paragraph I explained that the end game is that basically nothing controversial (of one side or another, whether I agree with it or not) is allowed past the censors, and we just get cat videos and updates about people’s dinner. And that would be a 100000x better user experience than what is on Facebook today.

Yes, if only people stopped saying things that are "controversial", the world would be 100000x better. No wait they can can say that, but not on any platform that matters. Maybe stop posting your own controversial ideas before saying that others have no right to.

Funny how you downgraded "world" to "Facebook user experience" in your second comment.

Freedom of expression, as a principle, not as the literal 1st amendment text, is a bit more important to continued existence of our society than your Facebook experience. Unfollow your antivaxer friends if you can't bear them.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#675

Post by invisible »

hammock wrote: post #618
mitigating wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's plenty? The number matters because it may be insignificant.

The CDC makes it hard to find the data but it's at least hundreds per day in the US. For example in Texas, from Jan-Oct of this year 8 percent of covid deaths were fully vaccinated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/09/texas-unvac... Most of that time period was before Delta or Omicron were dominant, not to mention the effectiveness of the vaccine wanes greatly over a ~6 month period, so the situation tod…

I'm not sure I follow the thread on how plenty of folks that are vaccinated have died (from being exposed to COVID-19, likely from those unvaccinated) means that the vaccine is not safe. The article you linked says those unvaccinated are 40x more likely to die (although it might be more like 14x with more recent data). Similarly, unvaccinated are more likely to spread COVID-19.

Unvaccinated are more likely to contract the virus from a family member. [0]

> According to the analysis, 25 percent of vaccinated contacts exposed to a household member with an infection contracted one themselves.

> In contrast, 38 percent of unvaccinated contacts got an infection.

> The study results suggest that because the viral load of vaccinated people drops off more quickly, their infection may be infectious for a shorter time than for unvaccinated people.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccinated-people-can...

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#676

Post by NullPrefix »

shadowgovt wrote: post #661
NullPrefix wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would fedex shadowban be ok too? They take parcels, give tracking numbers, but those specific persons never receive anything. Tracking is always stuck on "parcel enroute". edit: clarified wording, to make it clear that fedex shadowban is a hypothetical situation

If they take my package, never deliver it, and claim they delivered it, that's theft of tangible property, punishable by state law (and federal, if they messed with interstate commerce). There is no such "theft of information" for failing to route a data packet, nor should there be for obvious reasons. Better analogy would be if a newspaper took money to run my ad but never ran it. Also theft, or at least try-able in…

OK, what about letters instead of parcels? It's not for free either, it's paid for by the metadata. They ask for a recipient, you tell them the recipient and they say ok, will deliver, but never do.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#677

Post by shadowgovt »

NullPrefix wrote: post #676
shadowgovt wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they take my package, never deliver it, and claim they delivered it, that's theft of tangible property, punishable by state law (and federal, if they messed with interstate commerce). There is no such "theft of information" for failing to route a data packet, nor should there be for obvious reasons. Better analogy would be if a newspaper took money to run my ad but never ran it. Also theft, or at least try-able in…

OK, what about letters instead of parcels? It's not for free either, it's paid for by the metadata. They ask for a recipient, you tell them the recipient and they say ok, will deliver, but never do.

> It's not free either, it's paid for by the metadata

That's one of the things that could be argued in a court of law... That it was wrong for Facebook to collect data from someone on the false pretense that they would send a message they would not send. I wish the plaintiff who argues it the best of luck... Hell of an uphill battle. The notion data about a person has tangible value that belongs by default to the person and can therefore be exchanged is an open question (legally and morally). And there's still the issue of proof of harm. In fact, that's the biggest issue.

If a person thought they had communicated something via Facebook and Facebook falsely claimed it was sent when it was not, and that person could prove material harm as a result, they might have a civil case to rectify the specific harm. I struggle to imagine such a scenario, but I'll assume it could happen for the sake of argument. "Facebook silently black-holes your attempts to contact a celebrity" as an example, is not harm.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#678

Post by soundnote »

andrepd wrote: post #616
spaniard89277 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…

Not exactly doubting you, but is this really accurate? I hear a lot of "fact checkers are biased marxist commies" coming from people who just don't like it when "their side" is criticised. Which is silly. At least I can talk about fact checkers in my country: they give you a write-up of all the sources and reasoning they pursued to ascertain the truth of some thing, then add their own evaluation in a scale of true, m…

Some of them are straight up clowns:

> Claim Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.

Rating: Mixture

About this rating

What's True Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.

What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."

----

Almost all media organizations are encouraged to publish hate-inducing headlines and clickbait, so in principle fact checking could help people. Stuff like the above Snopes bit is pure partisan comedy that does nothing but undermine the entire idea, though.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#679

Post by quadrangle »

srcreigh wrote: post #547
quadrangle wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that it's hard to find the best balance in a headline let alone in a summary article. Yes, evidence of a problem in a portion of a trial is indeed evidence of problems in the trial. I can see room for misunderstanding no matter what. Emphasize the portion of sites where the problem was observed and it wrongly can be inferred that the other sites are fine even if they have no evidence either way. Emphasize the p…

Your argument is basically that this article may be largely speculation, assuming that no information was withheld (even though the article contradicts itself in its own communication about FDA review of the trial)... and that this speculation is the same as minimal conclusions based on available evidence. I disagree. One bad study doesn't mean all scientific conclusions are bad. One bad study doesn't mean Pfizer's t…

I don't know if you imagine me to be partisan here. I was arguing simply that headlines are hard to balance, and that people can interpret articles with a slant.

I wasn't saying that one bad study means the overall trial was bad.

The issue is that SOME people might think that. (Also others might think that if it's ONE study that's bad, the overall trial WAS fine, when that's not clear either).

The risk is whether real people take away a too-strong message and run with it.

In other words, journalists have SOME responsibility to not mislead people even when the main way people get off-track is their own erroneous jumping-to-conclusions as readers. We KNOW that readers do such things, so we have to be careful to minimize it.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#680

Post by _djo_ »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #155
rightisleft wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you just reinvented the news journalist...

Well, with the decline of newspapers there should be plenty of unemployed journalists who'll be happy to spread some knowledge around FB for a moderate fee? Or - this thought scares me the most - FB actually doesn't care about facts?

Google and Facebook are a direct cause of the decline in the quality of newspapers and journalism in general through their intentional strategy to capture as much of the value from news as possible, even though they created none of the actual content.

This means most newsrooms can't afford as many editors and fact-checkers, can't dedicate journalists to complex subject areas, can't afford to have journalists spending weeks or months on particularly complicated and deep stories, etc.

They surely knew what the consequences would be of starving newsrooms of income, yet went ahead anyway and didn't bother to even think of let alone implement alternative models to preserve valuable news.

It's a rather typical SV hubris, isn't it?

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