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There are certain topics which Youtube will not allow, they have various soft means of enforcing boundaries around those edges. One of those topics is analysis and discussion of Covid 19. They (Bret and Heather) have been very careful to stay within the stated rules, yet this still happened.
At some point, enough of us viewers will decide that it is worth overcoming the network effects, and get used to some new platforms for content sharing.
There are plenty of things you won't see anymore on YouTube. A year or two ago, videos focused on guns were removed. Even machine shop channels talking about the machining of parts had those videos removed.
Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
> Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
Our ability to discuss things like adults has been under threat for a shockingly long while now, and only been getting worse. This is partly due to such a large portion of society being unable to discuss things like adults without lapsing into political "Us vs Them"-ism nearly instantly.
On a related note; Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation? Is it purely because of the specific type of crowd this platform attracts? Is there any lesson that could be learned by the larger platforms from this to improve their services in this regard?
>Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation?
I attribute it to a few things that work in synergy
1. The voting model, and structure of the site work well for the crowd that gathers here. Keeping spam away is automated enough to keep the signal to noise high.
2. Dang keeps us from doing stupid things consistently enough that we collectively have learned good manners.
3. We've all seen how quickly things can get swamped, to make us really appreciative of what we've got here, and more careful about doing stupid things.
4. Upvoting, etc. are paced such that you don't get access to a bit of power until you understand it. It's subtle enough but very effective.
5. The management is not driven to push "engagement" or "stickiness" by the need to sell advertising.
If you took the codebase and started again, I'm not sure it would work more than 5% of the time.
I'd like to hear from critics of Bret that have actually watched his content, in particular the episode with Dr. Pierre Kory. Do you support YouTube's decision? What about YouTube taking down Dr. Kory's Senate testimony?
NOT HAPPY WITH YOUTUBE SPLITTING UP SOCIETY: I'm not happy that YouTube (having a strong network-effect monopoly on online video content) has decided to close the Overton window so much. People interested in the information will get it elsewhere. These kinds of policies have caused people who follow edgy content to find that content elsewhere, and those "elsewheres" can be very nasty and radicalizing places (such as BitChute). I wish YouTube kept people from getting radicalized, but they seem to push people away and into those radical corners...
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT BEST ADJUDICATORS, BETTER HYPOTHESIZERS: Bret and Heather are scientists and as such are not necessarily of the best mental positioning to adjudicate facts. How so? Scientists should form hypotheses and argue for them. Scientists must as a group take on and argue for multiple hypotheses, vigorously. The data will decide who wins. It is quite appropriate that Bret and Heather have taken up hypotheses in regards to Ivermectin and in regard to possible damage from the vaccines. That doesn't make these views "the final word" or even "stated as factual". I think Bret and Heather would agree and I think they try to make clear that their opinions are hypotheses.
As an example, Bret had a guest on who argued that the number of deaths associated with vaccinations was off the charts. Bret didn't agree but didn't counter-argue. The information was highly misleading. Last episode (on Odysee) they brought up a paper studying Israel where via vaccinations for every 3 people saved, 2 are lost. They weren't at all critical of the author's credentials, nor did they even seem to have read the paper yet, which was quite flawed. Mallen Baker's latest video goes into that a little bit. Mallen Baker is IMHO a very good adjudicator of facts.
I have a lot of respect for Bret and Heather and I think what they are doing is important. But it is also easy to be confused by them and to "follow" their beliefs as if they were clearly correct, when they are actually quite speculative beliefs.
All that being said, everyone communicates on social media now and scientists need to communicate just like the rest of us. If YouTube doesn't want to be the conduit for open communications, some other platform will be.
Strange how this was suddenly removed from the frontpage. Is this done manually?
That is why it is better to access sites like HN through the RSS feed [1] and ignore the front page. The feed shows which articles are posted in order of appearance, without manipulation. It also enables you to choose which articles to read without being influenced by the placement on the front page or the number of upvotes it got.
This is common for political content (often that leans in any direction) due to user flagging.
How is this political?
Possibly to do with Bret Weinstein's time at Evergreen State College? The woke mob ousted him.
Like it or not, COVID is a politically charged topic (in the US). One side of the political spectrum vehemently opposed mask mandates, while the other said we should wear them. If the two major political parties can’t agree on something, it’s a political topic.
It’s sad that as millions of people were dying, the two parties couldn’t agree on the simplest of things, but it is what it is.
No, we didn't do anything manual on this post (before now). It set off the flamewar detector.
I noticed that as well.
Wondering as well.
It is very disappointing that a discussion regarding YT censorship of good science can be taken down this easily on HN.
There are a few folks with some pedigree desperate for attention on Social media. They refer obliquely without evidence to plausible methods or peddle 'click-bait' thoughts. Mr.Bret Weinstein and his brother Mr.Eric Weinstein, appear to belong to this category - they kind of support each other well. Mr.Eric Weinstein for example, dangles a few incomplete physics theories without any formal proof. This is in sharp contrast to true legends like Mr.Grigori Perelman who posted a complete proof of the Poincare conjecture on Arxiv and turned down the Fields Medel.
Who are Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and why are the controversial?
I don't understand why businesses insist on betraying the very values they were built on in the first place. YouTube has always been about helping people feel heard and giving them a voice through their platform. Decisions like this one simply prove that in a few years they'll likely be defined as a publisher and not a platform.
This should not be flagged. Bret and Heather both have PhD's in biology and the episode in question with Dr. Kory also featured Dr. Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology. This is science not politics.
Scientific conversation happens between people who are actually practicing in the field. Scientists on social media are just engaged in promotion.
When Neil Degrasse Tyson talks on YT, I consider that a combination of promotion and pedagogy. But that's not science. He's not engaging in scientific conversation with fellow colleagues. This is not an indictment on Dr. Tyson's expertise, but it is a criticism on confusing scientific discourse with mass media promotion.
Another difference I'd draw between any other scientific field is that astrophysics is largely orthogonal to matters of public health or finance. Likewise, a math crank is much less likely to cause damage than a doctor promoting a drug, or a finance expert promoting an investment.
Health and finance are very special fields, and they deserve to be treated so in the arena of mass media promotions.
You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens.
This statement, "You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens," is anti-scientific. I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's description in _The Demon-Haunted World_ of people who make profoundly unscientific statements using the words of science, because they want the authority and respect accorded those words, not realizing that the authority and respect comes from the methods of science, not just the words.
You don't "decide" "where" science happens. It's not a question of rights. It demonstrably does not happen at your will or on the basis of your decision. It happens the way science happens, because that's what science is.
A scientist eating a sandwich is not doing science. A scientist talking on YouTube is not doing science. A scientist doing science is doing science. That's not my decision, it's the definition of science.
You decide for me when you censor hypotheses and flag scientific discussion as political. That is happening en mass in the name of science.
Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
Again, this is not a decision I've made, but the actual definition of the things. I can't call a lollipop a frog and then get mad when it doesn't jump, or someone licks it. It is what it is.
>Using the words "hypotheses" or "scientific discussion" doesn't make those things hypotheses or scientific discussion. The first takes place within the parameters of experimentation, and the latter in papers and journals.
As a scientist, I can definitively say this is false. Both these things happen over beers quite frequently.
To further
If science only happened in labs and journals, how did we ever get to the point where those things existed?
Edit: to pre-empt the likely rebuttal
I'm curious if you believe that only scientists can practice science.
Of course not! I would hope every student practices science as part of a general childhood education.
But when it comes to potentially life-saving medicines or therapies, the standard should be a bit more rigorous than sixth-grade classroom experiments.
Since we're talking about vaccines and medicine, what kind of science and what kind of scientists are we talking about here? What would amateur medical empiricism with human subjects look like? Every society has scientists and doctors, and every society must decide how to establish harmony with their professional medical groups.
> You shouldn't have the right to decide for me where science happens.
I mean, okay.
They engage in promotion of their findings, even if only review or survey of other studies. Communicating findings enables replication.
I guess I should be glad that Internet censorship went from “it will only be flat earth and Holocaust denial” to Hays Code so fast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code) that the problematic nature of this is impossible to deny.
Weinstein went (or revealed himself to be) pretty much crazy around the time Trump lost the elections. I'm having really hard time believing now that he's being "censored" because he's "talking about science". There are better reasons.
I heard his name over the Evergreen thing but forgot it.
I listened to the episode "Doing science in an emergency" [0]. It's terrible. Lots of circular logic and self congratulation. It reminded me of reddit's "IAmVerySmart" sub.
I don't think anyone should be banned (he hasn't been), but this isn't a hill for anyone to die on. He seems to have fallen into a weird rabbit-hole where he fails to admit any possibility of error on his own part.
Ivermectin does seem to be a very poor candidate as a treatment for C19 [1]. People have been made very sick ODing on it. So maybe stop pushing it?
[0] https://podyssey.fm/podcast/itunes1471581521-Bret-Weinstein-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_drug_repurposing_rese...
Edit: the irony of being down voted by his supporters without anyone engaging is not lost on me.
I downvoted you because it seems like your comment is largely composed of empty insults ("it's terrible", "reminded me of reddit's 'IAmVerySmart' sub", "weird rabbit-hole"). You don't give any examples for the specific criticism you make (circular logic). You say he fails to admit any possibility of error whereas I know that he readily admits the possibility of error.
There are also a few cases where your comment is misleading. You write that he isn't being banned, neglecting that his videos are being removed, his channel getting strikes, and his channel getting demonetized. YouTube is clearly censoring and suppressing his content and he is clearly on track to get banned. You say that some people have been made very sick ODing on Ivermectin, which is true, but only when they take massive amounts and is also true of the vast majority of drugs. Taking massive overdoses of anything is ill-advised. You write, again without explaining, that Ivermectin is a "very poor candidate as a treatment" - which is an odd claim to make given that Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and has at least some experimental data suggesting it may have uses. And, also, Ivermectin is being used in Latin America and India as a treatment currently. To sum that up as "a very poor candidate" strikes me as disingenuous.
Hope this help clarifies why at least one person is downvoting you.
>You don't give any examples for the specific criticism you make (circular logic)
They linked to the Wikipedia page. Which appears to say that the effect found "in vitro" is unobtainable unless you take a massive OD.
Useful drugs have an OD amount that is greater than the effective dose.
Supposedly larger scale tests are being done, so we'll see.
The idea is to take Ivermectin as a prophylactic. Weinstein is not suggesting taking a massive overdose of Ivermectin. He makes this clarification repeatedly.
Fyi, Ivermectin only works at very high doses. Taking it at safe doses doesn't work at a prophylactic or anything else.
It's overdose or nothing.
Thanks for replying. I don't think we'll "agree" but I appreciate being heard out at least.
The most glaring example of his circular logic starts around 29min mark in the podcast I linked to (#83). He is discussing lab leak hypothesis and the logic is this:
* if we assume there was a lab leak, then that's good news: the means novel viruses in nature are much rarer than expected.
* based on that we should stop gain of function research because natural gain of function is much rarer than lab leaks from man made gain of function research
* since we now agree lab leaks are much more likely than natural novel viruses, it makes no sense to believe covid 19 was anything other than a lab leak.
He jumps from "IF it was a lab leak" to "the rot in our science society is so bad" in 1 sentence. His wife takes over and repeats the assumption that all science is totally corrupt (where did that come from?) and that we should believe its a lab leak because then we can just close all the labs and never have another zoonotic virus. Wtf, where did that come from?
See the problem?
I felt sorry for him over the Evergreen stuff. He was right to object. I don't think anyone should be banned from YouTube short of calls for violence (or CP). I also think YT have a terrible approach to the censorship they do (it's arbitrary, it's often wrong, it's unappealable etc).
Im just saying this isn't a hill worth dying on. He is not making much sense as far as I can see.
Fyi, I also replied on the other thread.
Two thoughts:
First, and most importantly, it seems that sometime over the past decade we transitioned from the belief that free and open discussion is more important than winning the argument. We now appear to rely on an entirely unnuanced framing where all discussions have maximum certainty, all harms are equal, and therefore silencing disagreement is always a valid and righteous (and even preferred) tactic.
Second, I listened to the first 10 minutes past the recommended point in the podcast, and heard the first two points made, but not the circular logic of the third point. It’s possible that occurs later, and I just haven’t listened far enough. As they have moved on to the “rot” portion, it seems that I should’ve heard the third point, but perhaps I’m just interpreting what they say more literally.
We can apparently agree that he should not be banned from YouTube. I personally am not very interested in Ivermectin or Brett Weinstein. I am most interested in reasonable views being suppressed by big tech companies who think they know best. I believe that is deeply pernicious, will continue to get worse, and given the extent to which these companies are entrenched in our lives - will be increasingly difficult to remove.
Maybe Ivermectin is useful, maybe not. We should be allowed to discuss the evidence without Google silencing us. That is the issue I'm most concerned with.
My focus on Weinstein and the supporting evidence for Ivermectin is to argue that these are not mad delusions getting censored. It's not a person selling snake oil. I wouldn't care if definite scams were suppressed. I think Weinstein is using real evidence and making a good faith argument and that kind of thing shouldn't be censored.
I don't understand what you mean by "this isn't a hill worth dying on". I'm not proposing that anyone kill themselves over this. There is no dying involved. I do think it is a bad practice on Google's part which is worth complaining about. I also think people should explore alternatives - I have been impressed by https://odysee.com/ for example. I also think it is important to acknowledge Google is suppressing free speech in a meaningful way. Censoring covid discussion is one example, Google's suppression of the Uyghur genocide is another.
It would seem that the creators actually relish this because it's a great attention grabbing tactic. It's the same thing as click bait headlines "one weird trick"... trying to goad the platforms into enforcing their policy so that you can jump up and down about how you're being "censored"... A certain kind of audience, prone to conspiratorial myth, will flock to these creators and the "controversy" like moths to the flame. https://twitter.com/NovelSci/status/1404819889454342159
The channel was half their income, and there's no reason to doubt their sincerity. Maybe the end result is what you say, but your comment was about their intentions.
Except the problem with your theory is that Bret doesn't make content related to conspiracy theories...