Perhaps this comment is dangerous and problematic.
The idea that your ISP should be monitoring the semantic content of their customers is disturbing, and you imply that they should do something about content that, what?, they don't like? That they think is illegal? That the government tells them to report on?
This is constantly recurring debate on HN. What is the appropriate level of censorship? Who should be censoring? By what criteria is something censorable?
I emphatically disagree with the notion that ISPs should do the censoring. They should be neutral carriers of data.
In some peoples mind even questioning or being skeptical of many of the more extreme covid claims and actions is extremely dangerous. According to some “experts” we shouldn’t be allowed to research covid, look at public covid data sets, or even think very hard about it. We should, instead, have almost complete blind faith in a handful of “experts” and just roll over and do whatever they recommend.
A ton of our actions in the last 11 months have been accepted based on nothing but appeals to authority. More disturbing is how many real life people I talk with whose arguments for all our restrictions boil down to raw appeals to authority.
To be fair, some random persons datapoint wrangling can (and usually does) have large number of eyeballs than a life long trained professional with a PhD. While the data should be public and object to scrutiny (ideally by other experts in scientific community), how much insight would untrained people actually get? Apart from alternative facts and "just a flu". Many popular blog posts and opinions were proven to be flat out wrong.
If we don't trust the people dedicated to handle that kind of situations, who can we trust? I totally agree there has not been enough transparency (what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point. We think X Y Z, it might change completely in a month) about what we know, but I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times) than some random forum with no credentials.
What politicians do based on these observations is a very different thing.
I still would rather trust WHO/CDC (who have been proven incorrect multiple times)
The problem is that when you use your authority to push something, and that something turns out to have been wrong or even a patronizing lie (e.g. masks, percentage of population required for herd immunity, predicted length of the pandemic), you lose all respect for your authority. See also "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."
>> what panic would it cause if the scientists say "We don't know at this point <<
this is the crux of message management; panicing people are desparate for return of predictability, anyone who provides that will have happy customers for a while.
the idea that the information in raw form that the professionals use is somehow not of public utility needs to go away. this is part one of a double punch the next being the discovery that while data was sequestered, the general populus was lied to about it. Not that that IS what is happening here, but getting caught out doing that is beyond discrediting.
its not good policy to build an abberant world view among your population that will culminate in being crushed by reality, this is why people panic in the first place, and the solution seems to be keep cycling that way so that panic is assauged by building another alternate belief that looks comfortable. its like the trope where someone is hiding/slash disposing of the body while having a conversation accross the house designed to prevent someone walking in before its all hidden away.
