[csnover]

It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit.

All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html

[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html (table of contents)

[chordalkeyboard]

> It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit.

The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to.

> All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them.

This is precisely why no person can be expected to perform this role as a gatekeeper of truth.

Thanks for your links, I'm a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. With regard to [1], there's no reliable test to see where a person is on the psych spectrum, even heavy doses of introspection can lead to limited and imperfect insight, and its likely the case that the same person will move up and down on the psych spectrum depending on a variety of factors. Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.

[csnover]

> The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to.

This isn’t what I was hoping folks would take away from my comment.

Have you ever been too invested in some problem, or too upset by something, to see the truth of the situation? And when you ask someone else, who is not emotionally invested, they easily point out the way forward? That is the kind of phenomenon I am talking about.

Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.

I am not claiming that there is any single entity that is capable of being a gatekeeper of all truths. I am saying that there are people who are going to be less capable than others to evaluate the truthfulness of a specific idea. In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not), or an audience member who is strongly motivated to agree with that lie. And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.

> Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.

Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Have you ever been too invested in some problem, or too upset by something, to see the truth of the situation? And when you ask someone else, who is not emotionally invested, they easily point out the way forward? That is the kind of phenomenon I am talking about.

Yes I have. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a reliable test to identify whether a person is capable of rational thought on a given subject. This means that when we witness a dispute between people about an issue, we are unable to reliably and provably evaluate the disputants meta-level reasoning. This is complicated by the fact that evaluating someone's reasoning on the meta level is nearly always complicated by object-level concerns, including our own cognitive biases.

> Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.

Thats why its so harmful to put people in a position of being an information gatekeeper. You have no way of ensuring that your information is being filtered by a person who is emotionally detached. In fact, due to the potential for influencing other people, those positions are much more likely to be occupied by partisans who will then use it to advance their own perspective, often without even realizing it.

> In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not)

This is exactly the problem. There is no reason to suppose that a youtube moderator is non-partisan, a high rung thinker, or emotionally detached from the subject they are evaluating.

> And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.

Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.

> Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.

I feel exactly the same way. I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far, or perhaps Aumann's agreement theorem [0] is not applicable to this issue for some reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

[csnover]

> There is no reason to suppose that a youtube moderator is non-partisan, a high rung thinker, or emotionally detached from the subject they are evaluating.

The other way to frame this is that there is a reason to suppose that, at this point, someone uploading videos to YouTube claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud—which is all that YouTube are prohibiting here—is almost certainly not a high rung, emotionally detached thinker.

> Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.

No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective. There are no certainties when dealing with humans and we just have to roll with it using the best heuristics we can.

> I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far,

I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.

Believe me, I totally understand the potential for harm caused by powerful interests controlling a narrative—there’s a limitless number of examples to choose from, many of which have been targeted directly at people like me—but the harm that is happening right now is that other powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud and are encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.

In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy. It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.

I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content. I suspect YouTube would not need to ban this content at all if their algorithm hadn’t spent the last decade optimising for engagement over all else.

[chordalkeyboard]

> The other way to frame this is that there is a reason to suppose that, at this point, someone uploading videos to YouTube claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud—which is all that YouTube are prohibiting here—is almost certainly not a high rung, emotionally detached thinker.

I'm not aware of that reason. Could you explain further?

> No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective.

I disagree, but I'm really saying that I'm unable to make that deduction. Perhaps if you shared your reasoning process I might agree.

> I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.

Almost certainly that is the case. I'm of the "sunshine is the best disinfectant" persuasion. When you tell people they aren't allowed to question the integrity of an election it is absolutely consistent with the interpretation that those questions might lead to unwanted answers. Its clearly consistent with other interpretations but the problem with closing down debate is that you lose the opportunity to compare those interpretations.

> powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud

If they have made it up, wouldn’t the best response be to ask them for evidence so everyone could see how the allegations were baseless?

> encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.

If you consider that partisans of the other side are also flooding social media with their own claims about the integrity of the election, it starts to look more like a healthy debate that needs to be hashed out rather than suppressed.

> In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy.

There has already been a considerable amount of damage. I don’t know how permanent it is, but allowing President-elect Biden to take office under this cloud of suspicion while suppressing the means by which the suspicion can be removed would be devastating to the perception of legitimacy of the government. The only hope for our democracy is to investigate these allegations and demonstrate that our election system is robust enough to handle the challenge of people asking questions about facts they interpret to suggest fraud or misconduct.

> It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.

Its not clear to everyone that these videos are garbage, yet suppressing them will prevent people from critically examining them while providing evidence that the other side has something to hide.

> I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content.

Platforms that do not prioritize engagement will retain fewer users than those that do. Sadly, this is the same process in effect all over the world as a result of late capitalism converting everything into attractive commodities. This is the same emergent process that creates addictive snack foods and Netflix. If youtube didn’t prioritize engagement then they would be replaced by a platform that did.