So I think I have managed to concede my inner rebel and acknowledge that censorship needs to exist, not just around child exploitation material, but in some of the knowledge that goes into perpetrating some of these crimes, all this should be censored and illegal to possess.

That being said:
Google have announced today that they are going to delete all information on their platform that associated coronavirus with 5G.
Couple of things, firstly of course if you believe 5G can give you a virus, you're an A-Grade dick knuckle... But I don't know about arbitrarily deleting information because it's wrong, if it is fraudulent in its sources, then delete it on that ground... But I hate the idea that truth can be democratised, group think is always dangerous whether or not you think you have a moral case.

What say you on censorship?
Where do you draw the line?
Fraudulent medical claims, Anorexia how-to, climate change denial? Etc.

Systems of censorship are almost always abused by special interest groups. Look at the internet. Only two groups three things get censored. Child porn, pro-anorexia and copyrighted materials. One of those thing is clearly not like the others. Also all three proliferate despite the formal censorship on the internet.

Besides people have voted repeatedly in favor of fake news and alternative facts. The very process of banning fake news is weird as you get into epistemic matters and trying to define truth. Even in academia in the sciences we have a problem with different systems of truth and different systems of evidence as a result. This lead to my absolute favorite paper, "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons corrections." The key phrases there are perspective taking and post-mortem.

That said, truth is always democratised as truth is a social construct. We assume it has a definition as surely it must, but it does not. Look into Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution for the paradigm view of science. We focus around paradigms now and not absolute truth now. We seem to verify the paradigm and find truth relative to the paradigm now. Absolute truth went out of fashion when reductionism and thus positivism did.

Apr 6, 2020 21:50:00 GMT c said:

Systems of censorship are almost always abused by special interest groups. Look at the internet. Only two groups three things get censored. Child porn, pro-anorexia and copyrighted materials. One of those thing is clearly not like the others. Also all three proliferate despite the formal censorship on the internet.

Besides people have voted repeatedly in favor of fake news and alternative facts. The very process of banning fake news is weird as you get into epistemic matters and trying to define truth. Even in academia in the sciences we have a problem with different systems of truth and different systems of evidence as a result. This lead to my absolute favorite paper, "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons corrections." The key phrases there are perspective taking and post-mortem.

That said, truth is always democratised as truth is a social construct. We assume it has a definition as surely it must, but it does not. Look into Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution for the paradigm view of science. We focus around paradigms now and not absolute truth now. We seem to verify the paradigm and find truth relative to the paradigm now. Absolute truth went out of fashion when reductionism and thus positivism did.

Is it really a question of "fake news and alternative facts" or a matter of absolutism?
Isn't int much more comfy for people to have absolute truths and build a defense of them from their secure tower of superiority?
It seems that doubt makes people uncomfortable as does dissent.

I make it an absolute rule to never make absolute rules...  :suspic:
It is much better to let ideas and theories ferment and let them be challenged and stressed.
Don't choose your truth, let the fittest idea survive.
The problem is that it makes you not that sure about particularly much.
I did one of those Briggs and Myer tests, which I know you won't put stock in C, but it told me I am an argumentative asshole.

Popperian Empericialism is what I subscribed to for a long time where we hold a truth that exists until we can prove it wrong. The goal of science in this situation is to move closer to this truth.

Over time I come to see truth more in a Kuhnian style in that what people hold as truth exists tied to a social-cultural situation. Often science is not moving towards an objective truth but reinforcing this paradigm.

For fun take the Myer-Brigg test from two different sources. You usually get different results

Apr 7, 2020 12:16:03 GMT c said:

Popperian Empericialism is what I subscribed to for a long time where we hold a truth that exists until we can prove it wrong. The goal of science in this situation is to move closer to this truth.

Over time I come to see truth more in a Kuhnian style in that what people hold as truth exists tied to a social-cultural situation. Often science is not moving towards an objective truth but reinforcing this paradigm.

For fun take the Myer-Brigg test from two different sources. You usually get different results

I think I will be an asshole whatever test I take and whoever I ask, but I did the proper full one that takes half a day.

Isn't there a danger in paradigms generally? I don't see why people feel the need to build prisons for their ideas.
I get that we can gather associated truths together, but we should never see the boundary as more important than what is in it.
I also see the sciences, politics and creative fields are now clogged with people trained in the field but with no talent.
Not being able to add to the study or research in meaningful ways they become gate keepers and seek to define these paradigms in thick black sharpies and fight over them.
You would have to see this in your fields C where people want to argue semantics and bring topics such as race, sex etc into fields that are not related to them.
Because of course the field of physics is helped by injecting social science into it...

We need to get away from wanting to label everything, it's crazy.
We have even stopped the debates about real things, because debates make stupid people feel dumb, so they would rather shout until all meaningful discussion is shut down.
I would say the biggest problem these days is "Equity", the idea that every opinion carries the same weight, which is lunacy.
I listened to a Podcast last week Tyler Cowen on Meta-Rationality lately and I have found it fascinating and have been doing a lot of reading along these lines, it all makes so much sense and it is the piece that is missing, we need to drop the premise of this equity of ideas.

Labels have a use in they can define things to ease in communication. But you need to have a social consciousness that the term means what you say. Critical thinking was my white whale of a term as it has no meaning in education. We associate it with a lot of stuff, but it turns out if you ask people what is critical thinking objectively and empirically, people have no idea how to define it in a manner in which it can be measured. Blew my fucking mind.

So, what you talk about is the critical analysis fields and it is one that set me against most of my cohort. In the critical study field you use a bias len to examine an issue, such as feminism in science or the crime as a minority. You purposely look for the associations between the things and try to find ways to connect them. The method is not bad, as it can also be used to study things like profitability in markets, sustainability in planning, cost effectiveness in business planning. But in reality the only lenses we see are cultural ones due to a change in research that happened around the time this theory came into popularity. About 20 years back researchers took critical analysis and decided that the researcher can also be the subject of the study. This lead to the creation of autoethnography, the most fucked up form of science. When you get here, the researchers analyzes their own views in a biased manner looking for anything that can support their own theory. So you have a biased person, analyzing their own bias views with bias. Then the study is written up as if it is unbiased.

I joined the Society for Improving Psychological Science to fight shit like this and for a while I even stopped associating with psychology as a whole and only supported psychological science due to psychology's insistence that autoethnography is a valid form of research. SIPS and APA went at it for a while in a nasty fight were a bunch of us basically said there is a right and wrong to science and we will not respect or tolerate bad science any longer. Things died down as people got silenced and saw we were right but what a shit show it was. People were trying to change the way math and basic principles of science worked and shit to support their views and bad studies.

Great twitter account highlighting the fucked up shit autoethnography studies. Feminist glacier science and shit live here.

twitter.com/realpeerreview

Also look into the Sokal Affair. Sokal being a fucking next level troll got an article published using this funky postmodernism and pseudo-academic lingo to publish a paper in a top journal that argued gravity was social construct. As soon as the journal confirmed publication he did interviews explaining it the entire article was nonsense and pointed out most of it was really deep physics jokes, lame puns, and the exploration of a debunked 19th century theory. The kicker is this was peer reviewed for a top journal so a few people read his work, considered it brillant and opted to publish it without understanding at all what he was saying. A single physics student could have told you it was nonsense. Sokal wrote a book about it called Fashionable Nonsense on the dangers of using flowery talk and deep philosophy to obscure meaning or abstract a concept to the point where it is no longer useful. This has been replicated a few times, with my favorite being randomly generated papers getting into tier 2 and 3 journals. But as far as I know no one got into a tier 1 with absolute trash again.  Good article on the Sokal Affair and what the terms of the article actually mean.

physics.nyu.edu/sokal/weinberg.html