I'm not blaming the entire ethnic conflict on Facebook. I'm saying Facebook made it worse and, through reckless neglect, contributed to deaths of people that otherwise wouldn't have died.
Even if there weren't shenanigans, it's valid to be concerned. Incentives lead to outcomes. Companies do a cost-benefit analysis, if the legal/reputational costs are less than what they stand to gain, history shows that they'll do the thing and then lie about it. Sam might be uniquely resistant to this due to a personal ethical code, but it's impossible to know for sure given that I can't read his mind.
> Is that not based mostly on faith, next to some superficial indicators like "majority of scientists", etc.?
I believe it should be the same rule of thumb we are accustomed to using elsewhere.
If we have a computer security question, we will defer to the people who have dedicated 30 years of their life to mastering computer security. Whatever their opinion is, it's statistically more likely to be correct than whatever opinion I have after 2 weeks of "research". Likewise for astronomy, neurosurgery, being a pilot, and any other complicated area of study. I can't fly a plane, I can't operate the LHC, and I don't know anything about vaccines, so in all of these areas I need to outsource my opinions, to an extent, to the people that know these things better than everyone else. It's not perfect, and we can call that imperfection faith, but I can't think of a better approach.
> And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors
It's also how you accurately describe people who actually are cranks, such as creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn't mean that such descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful.
It's useful to have a unifying descriptive label because it reflects the fact that all these groups of people are similar in one important way: they think there exists an orthodoxy that are stifling any questioning of an official narrative. When, in reality, this "orthodoxy" are simply a group of people who know more about the topic than you, and who view the crank in the same way that you view flat earthers. As people with distorted thinking who have advanced an argument that is entirely void of merit.
> That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it
How do you think biologists should deal with the claims of creationists? That's not a rhetorical question. There are many, many groups with a grievance against the "orthodoxy", who harbour perceptions of being ignored/censored Do you think creationists are unfairly treated by biologists? Or do you think biologists are correct to ignore them? If you think biologists are correct in doing so, doesn't that violate the principles you've outlined?
> (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements)
I'm not dismissing any particular argument. I'm dismissing the attitude espoused in comments like this:
> Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
I would add that logical fallacies like ad hominem are only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be treated less seriously. I don't think the N+1th argument should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology conference if they have a long history of advancing ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep expertise in the domain.
Again, this sounds an awful lot like the creationist rhetoric a few decades ago.
> "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is".
All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change doubters.
The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot of credible physicists. Just because it turned out to be not superconducting doesn't mean that the people you are criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the available information at the time.
Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.
Many things, I'd argue. Meat industry causing animal suffering. Social media, tobacco, fast food industries causing human suffering. Oil and gas industry causing environmental destruction.
What direct suffering does algorithmic trading cause? It would take quite the narrative spin to argue that it's as bad or worse as one of the above industries.
A piece generated by Midjourney beat human artists in a competition judged by human artists. So there's good evidence to think these jobs are going to be replaced to a decent extent.
Human artists will still exist, it's just going to be democratized. Sort of like the impact of social media on traditional news journalists.
You don't avoid this by reducing federal scope and giving it to local. Say you achieve that goal, and then a populist gets in anyway. What happens then? Obviously they increase the scope, as all populists have done once they achieved power. The way you avoid this altogether is by creating good material conditions for people. One way you create good material conditions is by removing corrupt, vampiric local governments that contribute the opposite. Local governments are creating the conditions for populism by causing negative sum policies to add up to global tragedy.
Also, goodness isn't a binary switch, and goodness needs to be compared with the alternative.
I'd add that reducing local government doesn't mean that federal government has to be large and bloated. I still want a lean federal government.
I can also never pin down exactly what advocates of larger local government actually want. What powers and capabilities, specifically, should be removed from federal and done by local?
Please, no. I get the rationale. It's the local knowledge problem, combined with state/federal being more likely to be populists.
But local government irrecoverably sucks for systemic reasons that I've just started to notice.
With local governance there is no way to resolve dilemma like incentives that cause negative sum decision making, i.e. locally good but globally bad policies. For example, restrictive planning laws. Good locally, terrible globally. So terrible that it is the kind of thing that is a threat to the stability of society.
Another reason is that the competence of local governance is significantly lower than state/federal governance, who have budgets to hire actual intelligent experts. I don't know if you're interacted with local government officials. If you have, you will notice what I'm talking about.
A third reason is that corruption is worse in local governments. It flies under the radar because they're not under the microscope of journalists. There's no good mechanism to decorrupt them.