So the enormously popular post telling parents to make their kids drink Lysol should not have even the slightest warning next to it because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein?
It might seem that way but, as the many posts bellow show, that is literally what is being advocated. There should be no disclaimer on posts advocating drinking Lysol because: the parents would have hurt the kid anyway, there are already warnings on the bottle and, the sole remedy should be punishing the parent. It is Poe's law incarnate.
I know (we all know) how hard it can be hard to let go when other people say wrong or otherwise bad things on the internet, but it's a skill we all need to develop. If you simply foment against the badness and wrongness, it only adds more badness. HN is an experiment in trying to co-create a place on the internet that doesn't collapse into rancor this way. Maybe you don't owe the person you're arguing with better (though maybe you do), but for sure you owe this community better if you're posting here.
Even if your interpretation was accurate, no one is going to give their kids Lysol to drink because of any comment in this thread. Meanwhile you do actual damage to this place by posting in the flamewar style.
I think you're begging the question and using reducto-ad-absurdum here.
dilippkumar was highlighting that if people are prepared to believe extremely fringe ideas then simply telling them that a central authority thinks a fact is wrong will not effectively dissuade them. Your question elides that concern by simply re-pointing out that fake information is problematic. Fake information is problematic, but there is reason to believe that simply labeling the article about drinking lysol "false" is a sub-optimal strategy.
So the answer to your question is no, we shouldn't avoid labeling that post false "because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein," but I also do not think that was what dilippkumar was saying. I think he was trying to point out the problematic nature of "fact checkers" for people who don't trust traditional sources of authority.
If you'd like an example closer to home, ask the crypto community what they think of NSA advice on ECC curves.
Facebook is not the web, it is a toy devoted to advertisement.
It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.
The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.
Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.
It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.
The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.
dilippkumar was highlighting that if people are prepared to believe extremely fringe ideas then simply telling them that a central authority thinks a fact is wrong will not effectively dissuade them.
Maybe the goal shouldn't be to dissuade them. It doesn't have to be a conversion process. Perhaps if wrong-thinkers (for lack of a better term) can be convinced to look at all of the evidence, rather than the evidence that reinforces their existing viewpoint, that's a worthy goal. You may eventually convert those who are open-minded.
There are always going to be people who can't be swayed by anything, so maybe don't try. Perfect vs. good, and all that.
You can't save people from their own stupidity. I'd rather have stupid thoughts said out loud so they can be analyzed and detected rather than repressed inside ones own mind. I think that the non-sense that a lot of people are preaching online shows how much our education system is failing us. If this was covered up I might be able to delude myself into thinking differently about that.
In modern times it's easy to only notice the loons and crazy people that use their freedom of speech to push bullshit. But a lot of cultural and scientific progress throughout history has been made by individuals that choose to go against the norms of their time. IMO you need allow the crazy to get the crazy genius.
I've used this analogy in another thread, and I'd like to post it again to understand better the differences between public health and traffic laws.
"You can't save people from their own stupidity." Agreed, but how does that explain the rights-restraining acceptability of red lights and speed limits?
Red lights tell me, a law-obeying driver, that I must stop periodically while I drive through a city. Speed limits tell me, a safe driver, that I can't drive at whatever speed I deem safe. These are ostensibly done for "public safety," yet they place limits on what movements I can make. (For what it's worth, I have no problem with traffic laws.)
Note that these same laws limit pedestrians from movement such as walking on public freeways and crossing streets outside designated areas at designated times.
What makes limits on posting to Facebook different from traffic laws?
This isn't a snarky gotcha post, I'm trying to understand what the difference is between something with very little rights-related controversy (red lights and forbidding people from walking on freeways) and pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and Facebook moderation.
The difference is mostly that Facebook is a company creating restrictions for speech on their platform based on the views of employees and shareholders of the company on what speech should be acceptable on their platform. Rules of the road are determined by governments and all people have stake in the process.
For most publishers I don't mind them having their own rules on what speech they would publish because there are other publishers you can go to, but Facebook has almost a monopoly on social media. And because it's free for anyone to sign up it's almost impossible to compete with their network. If you want to post or publish social media content and have a lot of people view it you basically have to use Facebook's network. So you have to obey Facebook's rules.
It'd be like if a road company owned 90% of America's road and had rules you had to follow in order to drive on them. Sure there could be existing government rules of the road, but they wouldn't really matter because you have to follow the road companies rules on 90% of all roads.
It's fine to have restrictions on freedom of speech. We have them already. You can't lie under oath, you can't make death threats, you can't yell fire in a crowded room, etc. Now because of Facebook's monopoly they get to choose what speech is acceptable and what isn't at least for most social media. We don't really have any insight into what choices were made and why they were made either. I would rather have governments and their people decide this in courts and legal system. We at least we deserve more transparency into how Facebook chooses to filter and select content for people to view.
If the Lysol post was never made, do you think the parents who would have fallen for it will be safe for the rest of the duration of children's lives? Point here is that in your scenario the problem isn't the Lysol message, it's the low intelligence of the parents. If they fall for a post telling them to give their child Lysol, it's just a matter of time before they do something equally as dangerous and it should be surprising that they haven't yet done so. Are you going to monitor their interactions with the world 24/7 for the entirety of their lives? That's the only way you're going to accomplish what you're asking for here.
I'm no longer convinced that this is about intelligence.
It's easy to dismiss dissenting thinkers as "dumb hicks" or whatever epithet is trendy at the moment. But looking at a lot of the people who are promoting these theories on social media, few of them qualify as "low intelligence." In my observation, they tend to be celebrities, college-educated yoga moms, and even some high-profile tech types.
I work with low-education people. My department works with thousands of adults with an average fifth-grade education. In my experience, these people are more likely to follow the health advice of their local government authority than any crackpot conspiracy theory that floats through the internet.
Posts telling parents to make their kids drink bleach or disinfectant is, sadly, not actually a caricature. See, for example, how "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (aka, chlorine dioxide, aka bleach) gets pushed by malign quacks as a cure for HIV, malaria, hepatitus, autism, acne, cancer, COVID-19, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement
This one gets harder as who has the better/right-er numbers? Is Bolosonaro lying? Probably. But how do you tell? Who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?
But the clear-cut cases aren't actually the problem. You don't need to censor things that are so obviously stupid. The bottle of Lysol says things like "Hazard to Humans and Domestic Animals" and "call a poison control center" etc.
To the point that it's incredible that the few people who actually do it are even telling the truth about why, instead of being cases of insane parents looking for a cover story when they want to murder their kids, or Munchausen by proxy or something like that.
Meanwhile the same principle gets you absolutely nothing in all of the non-obvious cases, because when the answer is non-obvious (and therefore much more problematic if wrong) then Facebook doesn't have it either.
Maybe he is, but if a system is to function properly it must work in the worst-case scenario.
Therefore, I disagree that this person is arguing in bad faith and is in fact attempting to point out where the system fails in a worst-case scenario such as this.
No. Kids of such parents should be rescued from their tormentors. Stupid people will not go away just because you install some sort overload truth provider.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."