> fewer people engage in the discussion or share the information
More like fewer people engage in the discussion or share the information _where those researchers are looking_.
In reality, you're going to push people off Twitter and onto Gab, Parler, and Stormfront.
You can cite all the research you want. I've seen these effects of censorship first hand. Just makes matters way worse. If you believe all these people with different opinions are simply stupid, you're going to have a bad time. And, in my experience, such statements are a good proxy for middling intelligence on the part of the speaker.
On the contrary, banning people makes people seek out their narrative even more.
This idea that people aren't smart enough to make their own decisions and need you to spoon feed them the "right" information is the real problem here.
> If you say wait a second, but one of those is a fact about the world and the other is an insane conspiracy theory, then to them you're now a censor, an opponent of Free Speech.
No, if you remove the video from YouTube on the grounds of "removing false information" you're a censor. This is what has happened to e.g. Alex Jones, Milo, and many others for example.
By all means, leave a comment denouncing their idiocy. Make a response video showing why they're wrong. Whatever. But don't remove the video FFS. It just makes them believe it more.
You said it yourself: "the other is an insane conspiracy theory". That's obvious to you, and its obvious to 99% of people. So why do you feel the need to remove it?
Is it really that they don't want people to criticize their bullshit?
Or is it that they don't want their bullshit to be censored off the face of the planet? Whether or not we agree with their views, should they not be able to express themselves, and how they truly feel?
Imagine if your criticism of their viewpoints was being censored instead, so they got to speak un-opposed and un-criticized.
I constantly hear that people should "be themselves", and "should not be made ashamed of who they are". It appears this advice falls down when the people aren't who we want them to be, or hold views we consider "wrong".
If I hate a specific ethnic group, how else do you expect me to change, if not through sharing my views and then being challenged on those views. If you censor such a person, would you not then further radicalize them?
Depends on what's being done with those resources.
Example 1 - Drumming up support for a war with Iran. No it's not correct to direct resources to where they are most effective. (According to me.)
Example 2 - Trying to get homeless people in SF back on their feet. Yes, direct resources where they are most effective. (Again, according to me.)
But in example 1 if we ask the same question to a war hawk in congress, they'll give you the exact opposite answer. In example 2 if you ask Ayn Rand, again you'll get a different answer.
No one is objectively right or wrong in any of these cases.
> I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.
If fraud was committed successfully, it's not going to show up in the data. You won't know at all. It's like saying "there's no evidence of a cover-up". Well of course there isn't, that's the point.
I've heard plausible methodologies for carrying out mail-in vote fraud that would be undetectable. E.g. mail containing ballots being diverted/"lost". I can neither prove nor disprove this is happening though.
I agree that electronic voting is an even worse idea than mail-in voting.
There is video of Twitter employees admitting there are on-going efforts to silence "shitty people" on the platform. It's quite clear who these "deplorables" or "shitty people" are.
What is the most annoying about this, though, is the tweet they chose to "Fact Check". (I use quotation marks because "fact checking" by linking to CNN and WaPo is not fact-checking at all, rather an appeal to a different authority.)
The tweet they chose to police is speculation about the future. If I say the boiling point of water is 50 degrees, you can fact-check that. Its an objective truth that water boils at 100c.
If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement. All you can do is show me someone else's statements, opinions, and predictions on the matter.
Given that Trump says so much objectively false stuff, it annoys me they didn't go after one of those tweets instead.
You catch the most flak when you're over the target...
That's what already happens. Look at the comments on any prominent person's tweet and you'll see people going back and forth about what's right and what's false.
No one needs to do anything here. People can research and find stuff out for themselves, and come to their own conclusions.
N95 is the US standard, so it makes sense the US makes more of these than other countries.
Compare production capacity of N95s in the US with FFP2/3 in the EU, or KN95 in China. Then we'll really see how US production capacity stacks up.
To be clear, I have no idea how these production capacities stack up. But if we want to evaluate medical mask production, this is the comparison that needs to be made.
Yes, let's throw out valuable field evidence just because it doesn't fit some narrow definition of "valid experiment".
Compare 700 people who received a treatment to 700 demographically similar people who received the standard treatment in the same or similar hospital and you're going to get a useful result.
We can do your fancy RCT later when we aren't dying en masse from a novel and highly lethal virus.
The remaining population of COVID patients is a good control group. Or, if you prefer, randomly select sub-populations with similar demographic statistics.
That's wishful thinking. The virus will survive in Africa, or India, or many of the other places that are incapable or unwilling to enforcing a complete lockdown (many of these places are in the US itself).
As I mentioned above, we have only ever erradicated _one_ infectious disease in all of human history. The chances of COVID, with its highly infectious nature, being the second are quite slim.
Just like the first outbreak, all it takes is one person with the virus to start the whole process over again.
More like fewer people engage in the discussion or share the information _where those researchers are looking_.
In reality, you're going to push people off Twitter and onto Gab, Parler, and Stormfront.
You can cite all the research you want. I've seen these effects of censorship first hand. Just makes matters way worse. If you believe all these people with different opinions are simply stupid, you're going to have a bad time. And, in my experience, such statements are a good proxy for middling intelligence on the part of the speaker.