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by IshKebab 1829 days ago
Sorry, what exactly do you think is wrong with shutting down cranks and conspiracy theorists?

You may hope we live in a happy world where everyone can evaluate information fairly and detect nonsense perfectly but I'm afraid we don't. Go and have a conversation with my aunt who thinks that the government (there's only one I guess) created Covid in order to kill all the old people and save money on state pensions. Guess where she learned that.
1 comments
zephyr1 1829 days ago
If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove.

If it's more complicated then that, then you shouldn't be so confident you're the smart guy in the room.

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japgolly 1829 days ago
It takes orders of magnitude more effort to counteract bullshit than it does to produce it. Your opinion doesn't scale and not only is it easily exploitable by bad actors, it's happening in practice all over the place these days and is a huge, huge problem.
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zephyr1 1829 days ago
Or maybe your arguments aren't as good as you think...
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op00to 1829 days ago
Nah, his arguments are not only compelling but scientifically proven.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15291006124510...

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IshKebab 1829 days ago
> If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove.

Have you never spoken to conspiracy theorists? Go and watch one of the Flat Earth documentaries. If Flat Earth is a crank conspiracy theory then it should be easy to disprove and the conspiracy would die out, right?

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robbrown451 1829 days ago
"If it's a crank conspiracy theory it should be easy to disprove."

I might have agreed with that a few years ago, but crank conspiracy theories have gotten mainstream traction like I have never seen previously.

"Prove" and "disprove" are never fully black and white. It isn't easy to disprove the theory that the Chinese engineered Covid (i.e SARS-CoV-2) and its spike protein RNA so they could insert arbitrary genetic code into non-Chinese people via the inevitable mRNA vaccine they knew would be created (which itself contains genetic code directly copied from the virus itself). Maybe they want to control our minds, or make us susceptible to some future engineered virus that will take out everyone on the planet that was vaccinated.

I can't disprove that. Maybe someone can.... but whoever they are, they will hardly be able to communicate this to average internet users and YouTube consumers being as it is extremely technical.

But I can make a rational, reasonable analysis of this, and conclude it is unlikely enough that getting a vaccine is a good idea.

And by the way, it's not a matter of determining that you are the "smart guy in the room," it's really more a matter of determining what is the general consensus of many smart people in the room. Obviously that is getting harder to do.

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