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Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

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Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#541

Post by meheleventyone »

nosianu wrote: post #444
meheleventyone wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Laws exist, so there are no crimes? More if you don’t trust journalists to be honest when they at least try to establish norms of behaviour you should trust some random person even less. Both are amenable to corruption.

> some random person A journalist is some random person too. Only a handful of people know the person to any degree. You are asking to trust some brand. A brand that is controlled by few rich centralized media owners (in the "free" countries, government, directly or indirectly, in others). The main incentive of a journalist is the same as for any other employee. To Keep ones employment and to make money. The idealism…

> A journalist is some random person too.

The rest of my post you didn’t quote included the specific difference I was talking about that I note you don’t address.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#542

Post by meheleventyone »

jcbrand wrote: post #404
meheleventyone wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Laws exist, so there are no crimes? More if you don’t trust journalists to be honest when they at least try to establish norms of behaviour you should trust some random person even less. Both are amenable to corruption.

The choice is not between journalist and "some random person". There are many non-journalists, experts in their fields and who have a long history of credibility who publish information that one can read.

I was using the comparison to random people and influencers mentioned by zriha that spawned this thread of conversation. There are of course credible experts. However I’d argue many/most popular alternative sources chosen over journalism are not credible experts.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#543

Post by vannevar »

giantg2 wrote: post #535
vannevar wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, the individual chance of getting cancer by smoking a cigarette doesn't warrant fear. But if you apply this logic to cigarette after cigarette, you may end up in a PSA talking through a hole in your throat and telling everyone not to smoke. Fortunately, as human beings, we can see patterns in large numbers and act on them. We aren't limited to looking at the world through the keyhole of individual risk. We…

I think your system is not an accurate representation. They are talking about an individuals risk of these events killing them. Your system is talking about the cumulative risk of individual cigarettes. This distinction needs to be made because the risk varies greatly by location and ones preparation (mitigating factors).

My 'system' is talking about incremental risks, whether they are across time or across individuals. The point is that these incremental risks are not great in themselves, but when accumulated, they become substantial. If climate change contributes to increasing disease, as is projected, the cumulation of diseases over time become a substantial risk even to the individual, even if they aren't directly affected by flood, fire or drought. And of course even a low direct individual risk can cascade into a societal risk that circles back to affect the individual. Take the chief risk of COVID-19, which is that the local medical system is overwhelmed. When this becomes acute, as it did in Italy, it affects even those who were at little risk of COVID itself, by denying them access to health care in the event of an accident or other illness.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#544

Post by jimkleiber »

headsoup wrote: post #429
jimkleiber wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think fear can do a lot of things, as you say, the loss of freedom. I also think the lack of fear can lead to the loss of freedom. Fear can help us temper our actions so we don't do things that end up hurting us severely or even killing us. That being said, I would agree that repressed fear can do us quite a bit of harm and I think it often happens because we'll say fear is bad, without just appreciating how it hur…

Only if the lack of fear is because an authority figure has managed it all for you. This creates the bigger problem of a lack of self-regulation and automatic trust in authority.

I guess I meant lack of fear in a very basic way. Not being afraid to jump off a cliff can be pretty detrimental to one's freedom.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#545

Post by pchangr »

kabouseng wrote: post #509
vannevar wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that terrorism in the US is a miniscule threat in reality, killing a handful of people a year, whereas the virus is one of the top causes of death over the past two years. Not all fears are unjustified. Climate change already kills far more people annually than terrorism via floods, fires, and droughts. That being said, fear doesn't justify authoritarianism, even when the fear is reasonable.

Actually fewer die due to climate change due to fewer people freezing to death...

That’s a gross oversimplification of climate change. You have people dying because crops can’t survive.. people dying because they got misplaced on coastal areas .. people dying because of extreme heat.. people dying on fires … And that without counting that freeze to death due to extreme cold.. which climate change also causes

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#546

Post by Swenrekcah »

syshum wrote: post #483
Swenrekcah wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European perspective here: Trump was definitely trying to make himself a dictator, just look at how he handled losing an election. Please don’t vote him in again America. Agree on moral panic issues though.

Quoted post unavailable.

I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Clinton conceded right away and notably did not urge her supporters to storm the Capitol to “rectify” the results.

And regarding governors, recall that most of the swing states were under republican control.

Edit: I noticed now you gave the Russian connection as the example.

Russian interference was indeed the case.

Many people were angry at that but there’s an important difference between being angry at it and saying the Russians “stole” the election as in “had undue influence”, versus just pretending the result was rigged and you actually won an election you lost. That was something Trump did and it undermines the democracy you build your country on.

On the question of collusion the Muller report is quite informing but he explicitly didn’t want to say anything on the matter and left that to Congress.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#547

Post by giantg2 »

vannevar wrote: post #543
giantg2 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your system is not an accurate representation. They are talking about an individuals risk of these events killing them. Your system is talking about the cumulative risk of individual cigarettes. This distinction needs to be made because the risk varies greatly by location and ones preparation (mitigating factors).

My 'system' is talking about incremental risks, whether they are across time or across individuals. The point is that these incremental risks are not great in themselves, but when accumulated, they become substantial. If climate change contributes to increasing disease, as is projected, the cumulation of diseases over time become a substantial risk even to the individual, even if they aren't directly affected by floo…

Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population. The infectious diseases they talk about are from expansion of the disease carrier range (mosquitoes and ticks). These have mitigating factors to avoid the infections. There's very little cumulative risk and it's still largely location based.

So this is a far cry from your example of cigarettes and ending up in a PSA. The risk is much higher with cigarettes. As stated by the previous commenter - they are not something to be afraid of.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#548

Post by mensetmanusman »

hutzlibu wrote: post #504
mensetmanusman wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method applied to preferences is probably not the scientific method (in regards to control experiments (unless you have clones and access to the multi verse:)))

The very basic idea of the scientific method as I learned it, is: testing ideas by experiment. If it looks cold outside, but not too cold - I have the idea that a medium warm jacket of mine is enough. And then outside I see if it was adequate or not and next time under similar conditions I change accordingly, or go back to the house that instant. Sounds like common sense and it is. But not everyone is doing it. I ser…

“ I seriously got shocked by people telling me, they walk in shoes hurting them, but they did so because of style.”

Determining what to optimize for is basically what preference is. Some prefer attractiveness and aesthetics over comfort, and in most cases there is no option that optimizes all variables due to complex cross talk…

After you choose which subjective preference to optimize for, you can definitely employ the scientific method to try to parse that further, but that comes after the preference:)

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#549

Post by tempestn »

epgui wrote: post #328
tempestn wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but to me this comment came across as a bit patronizing.

Apologies— not the intention, sincerely!

Ha, happens to us all! Ironically my reply attracted downvotes, as it appears some felt the same way about my tone policing.

Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse

#550

Post by adolph »

philipkglass wrote: post #170
adolph wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why limit it to citizens?

Consider speech that is legal but likely to offend most Americans. For example, a picture gallery of American soldiers killed in Iraq, where each picture is captioned "Death to Crusaders, death to America!" If the 1a.gov platform is limited to citizens, it limits the number of accounts that can use that platform for agitating against Americans. If the platform is open to anyone in the world, it's going to end up as t…

> If the platform is open to anyone in the world, it's going to end up as the #1 host of terrorist-sympathetic media in the world.

Is it not more advantageous to collect the metadata regarding disagreeable content and shadowban it to decrease engagement?

How would citizenship be established to the platform? Would it not allow pseudonymous content? Do parents get to control the platform use of minor children?

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