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by darawk 1275 days ago
That's exactly my point though. Figuring out the truth is very hard, and often our best experts are wrong about extremely important things. If our best experts can't get such critical things right, who can we possibly put in charge of censoring misinformation?

I don't necessarily mean to indict the scientists of Semmelweis's day too much. I mean, they fucked up, to be sure. However it's understandable (somewhat) why they didn't listen to him.

But a society that allows those presently in power to censor information they consider to be false is a society that helps cement its present ways of doing things for eternity. I don't think that's a good thing.

A modern example of this might be the plaque theory of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know enough to know whether this is a fair description of the state of the science, but there is certainly a growing view that, a "cabal" of believers in this theory suppressed alternative views for a long time. It may end up being that the cabal is right! But it seems to me like there's enough uncertainty that a diversity of viewpoints should probably be heard.