An option that I think should be on the table (at least to consider) is “the post is accessible to LessWrongers, but requires a log-in, so it can’t go viral among people who have a lot less context”.
This requires a feature we don’t currently have, but I think we’ll want sooner or later for political stuff, and is not that hard to build.
Right now I think this post is basically purely beneficial (I expect the people reading it to think critically about it and have access to give information), but if I found the post had gone viral I’d become much more uncertain. (this is not to say I’d think it was harmful, I’d just have much wider error bars)
The level of handwringing about this post seems completely out of proportion when there are many thousands of people coming up with all sorts of COVID-related conspiracy theories on facebook and twitter. If it went viral my guess is that it would actually increase trust in the CDC by giving people a more realistic grounding for their vague suspicions.
We do, and that’s the point. It’s not “hey, we’re not as bad as them so don’t complain to us!”. It’s that there is already a lot of distrust out there, and giving people something to latch onto with “see, I knew the CDC wasn’t being honest with me!” can keep them from spiraling out of control with their distrust, since at least they know where it ends.
Mild well sourced criticism is way more encouraging of trust than no criticism under obvious threat of censorship because the alternative isn’t “they must be perfect” it’s “if they have to hide it, the problems are probably worse than ‘mild’”.
I responded to this on a different thread, but aside from the factual issues, this isn’t “mild well sourced criticism.” The post says the CDC is so untrustworthy that we can’t point uninformed people to it as a valid place to learn things, and there is literally no decent source for what people should do. That’s way beyond what anyone else credible was saying.
I think that requiring a login would reduce my concern about this post 95%. But given that it isn’t, you can’t wait for a post to go viral before deciding it was bad, you need to decide not to post / remove the post beforehand.
An option that I think should be on the table (at least to consider) is “the post is accessible to LessWrongers, but requires a log-in, so it can’t go viral among people who have a lot less context”.
This requires a feature we don’t currently have, but I think we’ll want sooner or later for political stuff, and is not that hard to build.
Right now I think this post is basically purely beneficial (I expect the people reading it to think critically about it and have access to give information), but if I found the post had gone viral I’d become much more uncertain. (this is not to say I’d think it was harmful, I’d just have much wider error bars)
The level of handwringing about this post seems completely out of proportion when there are many thousands of people coming up with all sorts of COVID-related conspiracy theories on facebook and twitter. If it went viral my guess is that it would actually increase trust in the CDC by giving people a more realistic grounding for their vague suspicions.
I think that we should aspire to higher epistemic standards than conspiracy theorists on twitter.
We do, and that’s the point. It’s not “hey, we’re not as bad as them so don’t complain to us!”. It’s that there is already a lot of distrust out there, and giving people something to latch onto with “see, I knew the CDC wasn’t being honest with me!” can keep them from spiraling out of control with their distrust, since at least they know where it ends.
Mild well sourced criticism is way more encouraging of trust than no criticism under obvious threat of censorship because the alternative isn’t “they must be perfect” it’s “if they have to hide it, the problems are probably worse than ‘mild’”.
I responded to this on a different thread, but aside from the factual issues, this isn’t “mild well sourced criticism.” The post says the CDC is so untrustworthy that we can’t point uninformed people to it as a valid place to learn things, and there is literally no decent source for what people should do. That’s way beyond what anyone else credible was saying.
Of course we should, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether this post is hazardous if people without LW accounts read it.
Unless there are large enough demographics for which this post looks credible while FB conspiracies do not.
I think that requiring a login would reduce my concern about this post 95%. But given that it isn’t, you can’t wait for a post to go viral before deciding it was bad, you need to decide not to post / remove the post beforehand.
I think such a feature would be really useful and taking the current case as a reason to prioritize developing it seem prudent.