[joshuamorton]

> It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."

This is such a silly argument. If I tell you two pieces of information: "Vaccines cause autism" and "Vaccines do not cause autism", how do you practice believing? By putting children at risk of preventable diseases?

Same goes for hydroxychloroquine or turmeric for covid-19. We have (at this point) decent scientific evidence for these not helping prevent the disease, and yet people will take them and either hurt themselves (chloroquine) or be willing to engage in more risky behavior otherwise.

The easiest way I have of putting this is that there is no difference between having no information, and having all possible information. If I present you with all possible strings of length < 100 containing "covid-19", you'll have lots of reasonable sounding statements about preventing the spread of covid-19. But without authoritative and reliable sources for why some of those strings are valuable to obey and others aren't, you're in no better place than if you had no information at all.