It depends more on the ignorance of the moderator and on how much time he’s willing to spend than on the quality of the evidence. there definitely are cases of of PHDs and maybe even professors advancing pseudoscience. so this doesn’t guarantee trustworthiness.
the moderator has to make a decision in a state where he can’t trust himself to distinguish real stuff from bullshit. he goes for minimizing harm at the cost of deleting novel good ideas. seems like a sensible decision to me.
Interesting question, i don’t know. but it also doesn’t matter here. if the moderator is ignorant he’s also ignorant of this fact, and thus cannot take it into account or will have to spend effort finding a good answer for it—so we’re back at square one.
Again, I have to disagree—misinformation is much more likely than information by default, and the moderator need only have a reasonable low-probability prior in order to reject unusual/uncommon claims without evidence.
Sorry about that; I believe I misread your comment as implying that if the moderator is ignorant, he won’t have enough information to form a reasonable prior. My disagreement was along that line, as it seems that misinformation, especially about medical things, is so prevalent that everyone’s default prior should be ‘fraud unless lots of evidence points the other way’.
I think there’s a difference here between sharing a link to RadVac and sharing a link to a LessWrong post by someone without credentials doing something on their own.
Even with a Harvard professor as an author?
It depends more on the ignorance of the moderator and on how much time he’s willing to spend than on the quality of the evidence. there definitely are cases of of PHDs and maybe even professors advancing pseudoscience. so this doesn’t guarantee trustworthiness.
the moderator has to make a decision in a state where he can’t trust himself to distinguish real stuff from bullshit. he goes for minimizing harm at the cost of deleting novel good ideas. seems like a sensible decision to me.
How often do scholars of such prominence promote dangerous pseudoscience?
Often, e.g. Stanford profs claiming that COVID is less deadly than the flu for a recent and related example.
John Ioannidis, of all people, who should know better.
For children, it is as far as we know.
Interesting question, i don’t know. but it also doesn’t matter here. if the moderator is ignorant he’s also ignorant of this fact, and thus cannot take it into account or will have to spend effort finding a good answer for it—so we’re back at square one.
Again, I have to disagree—misinformation is much more likely than information by default, and the moderator need only have a reasonable low-probability prior in order to reject unusual/uncommon claims without evidence.
I agree with that. not sure what you think i meant that you disagree with it.. (or was it directed at the comment above me?)
Sorry about that; I believe I misread your comment as implying that if the moderator is ignorant, he won’t have enough information to form a reasonable prior. My disagreement was along that line, as it seems that misinformation, especially about medical things, is so prevalent that everyone’s default prior should be ‘fraud unless lots of evidence points the other way’.
I think there’s a difference here between sharing a link to RadVac and sharing a link to a LessWrong post by someone without credentials doing something on their own.