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I wonder when people will finally understand that outside of mathematics, there is no "truth" and "falsehood". There is only statements that have sufficient evidence to be considered a fact, or statements that lack evidence or even statements that go against evidence while lacking supporting evidence (Lets call these statements "Trumpian statements"). If we establish, that a statement is "really true" only if a celestial being, aware of all the facts, would consider this statement true, then pretty much all statements in the world have an unknown for their truth value. The error also can't be established. What people thought "really true" a hundred years ago, we now laugh about. Same will happen to many other things. Censorship of "falsehoods" is a very dangerous concept. It prevents innovation. Einstein was essentially a heretic. His theories were bold and completely absurd to most people back then. Should we have censored them? However, for many many statements, a lack of evidence has no impact on the truthfulness. Just because I can't prove something, doesn't make it false. Just because there is a mountain of counter-evidence, doesn't make a statement false, it just makes it less likely to be "really true". However, there could be a surprising piece of evidence, that trumps (pun intended) all existing counter-evidence. If you want to censor, then you essentially force society into coherence. That is good in the short-term, as it reduces conflict, but very very bad in the long-term, as it suppresses non-standard opinions (i.e. innovation and free expression). A much better approach than censorship is to create a channel "What Joe Rogan Got Wrong" and list all his supposedly falsehoods and explain the mountain of evidence against it. That of course takes effort. But yeah, the quick solution is rarely the best. |
Edit: Due to some confusion in the comments. I just want to clarify some of the terminology here. When I say that science is "censored" I mean it is "censored" in the same way that Spotify is "censoring" Joe Rogan. Nobody is stopping any scientist from posting their papers anywhere they want online and there is nobody stopping Joe Rogan from taking his show and broadcasting it elsewhere. They are only being "censored" in the sense that the mainstream publishers have high truth quality standards and some shows (and scientific papers) don't meet those standards and thus publishers will refuse to publish the low quality material.