In practice, this leads to weird scenarios where Exxon can run promotional ads but climate groups can't run ads in opposition.
I'm not saying this is the wrong policy necessarily, just that "politics" is a tricky thing to define. Labor unions can't run ads saying workers should demand more pay, but Amazon can run ads saying their jobs pay good wages.
For as long as money is instrumental in determining the allocation of resources and power, the goals of commercial entities (and their propaganda) are inherently political in nature. By advocating for their own profit they are advocating for a certain resource distribution strategy that they want as many people to get on board with.
What Twitter is really saying is that they are fine with political messages, just not from institutions and by means that are typically associated with democracy: for as long as you only represent your self-interest rather than constituents and members in a democratic sense you are free to propagandize as much as you want. The result is highly political, just directly anti-democratic.
That's an unusual take... Twitter is pretty widely regarded as about as far as perfect as it can get, putting it mildly - and this is across the political spectrum. I'm curious to understand your perspective on why you believe twitter is near perfect.
Twitter said that's not why they removed the blue check and it was re-added. Not that I trust press-releases but that seems like it would be a bit of a departure for them.
If that supposition is even true, Twitter removing a blue check because he publicly supported a union— the initial implication to which I replied— and twitter removing and restoring a blue check because people exploited their abuse reporting system are two very different things.
Twitter is close to being the perfect perpetual rage generator, is that what you meant by calling it 'close to being perfect'? The format in combination with their nefarious algorithm makes for a nearly perfect polarisation machine where you're either 'with' or ´against' how Twitter-the-company wants you to think.
I don't experience that at all. Everybody seems to be expecting a platform that only supports posts that are up to 280 characters in length to offer nuanced takes on politics, science, and news. When it doesn't they call it shit. Most of us are using it wrong, the algos are adjusting to that to sell ads, and everybody is miserable about it.
Nitter is the only way I can consume twitter now. I just took the time to make bookmarks to my top 20 people that I follow and use those. I hate responses to tweets and retweets (about 98% of the time) and nitter lets me cut out all that garbage.
It seems the best solution is to ban all advertising and money interest on the platform. Then Twitter would have a lower valuation, and they would not do that. It is a good thing we do have ad-free social media like Twitter such as Mastodon.
This is basically a good thing, but I'm always annoyed by the use of "science" like this, making it into an institution with a unified voice. If they used the word 'consensus' or 'studies' the claim would sound weaker, and they want to give it the weight of a quasi-religious absolute.
Which is great for the tactical, rhetorical power of their argument, but plants the seed of their strategic downfall. If you do this enough, "science" is lowered to a political device commanding the same respect as sociology did in the Soviet Union (or even in the US, at this point), ie less than nothing.
Every generally accepted theory starts out as a theory held by one. And sometimes directly contradicting the consensus.
We think independently for a reason. Not submitting to the PERCEIVED consensus is a good thing. It means we can have different deeply committed people investigating different theories at the same time, rather than waiting for a central authority, financed with other people's money, to give up on one and pick up the next when it finally gets over its ego.
It's fine to have competing explanations for the available evidence. But that's not what anti-science political positions usually look like. Rejecting both the evidence and the explanation without justification or alternative is completely different from reasonable scientific dissent.
Right. The vast majority of people rejecting global warming are doing it for irrational reasons.
But Twitters rule would also exclude earnest differences of opinions. During law school, my class had a talk that included a tenured climate scientist at our university (a major research institution). He had a non-census view of climate change that predicted warming 25-50% less than UN models. A bunch of law professors came and read him the riot act for DENYING SCIENCE. It was crazy. That's exactly the type of censorship big tech is engaging in.
Twitter ads are not the place to overturn scientific consensus, especially not such an important and well-established topic. If you have material new information, write a paper, get it verified/replicated, etc.
> Right. The vast majority of people rejecting global warming are doing it for irrational reasons.
No they are doing it for rational reasons from the perspective of an individual but presenting irrational arguments for their position. For any given individual the impact of climate change is going to be irrelevant in western countries. Worst case, you just move somewhere else. However, on a societal scale, having a mass of people migrate from one place to another is a recipe for chaos.
Would you consider any of these reasonable scientific dissent:
1) We should not be overly concerned about global warming because near/future technology will likely solve the problem.
2) The weather changes will be gradual enough that people can adapt. People frequently migrate due to weather/climate.
3) There are a lot of climate-related orgs now that fund climate research. Is it possible that the existence of these organizations and continued-funding incentives result in a selective pressure to publish some results and not others?
Those are all mere suppositions that assume evidence which needs to actually be furnished for a proper debate. But aside from that:
1) is wishful thinking that may end up coming true, but is naturally not currently a position supported by science. I don't think this can be discussed much in a scientific context beyond basic stuff like calculating the magnitude of carbon sequestration needed, what such efforts would cost with current technology, and how many orders of magnitude cheaper future technology would have to be to provide a viable solution for the problem as it will exist by the time such technology is invented.
2) boils down to a question of the precision of climate forecasts, and there's certainly room for reasonable debate when framed that way. But given how many of the historical instances of weather/climate-related migration and adaptation came with immense humanitarian costs, you have to be really sure that global warming will be sufficiently slow-moving to not actually be catastrophic. I suspect the bulk of the evidence is against the proposition that global warming will be too slow to cause large-scale famine, or that rising sea levels will be too slow to cause major disruption to coastal cities. At the very least, it seems unjustified to be confident that climate change effects will never approach the scale of what something like a volcanic winter causes.
3) simply ignores the existence of political and corporate resources that are eager for climate change to be disproven. Opponents of climate change are both directly involved in the search for evidence against climate change, and indirectly pressure mainstream researchers to publish only their strongest, most defensible results. So it's quite hard to imagine how the mechanism of bias you point out could be strong enough to produce the net effect of a scientific consensus that greatly exaggerates the magnitude of climate change. This is a reasonable question to investigate, but the question itself does not provide any grounds for rejecting the available evidence for climate change. (This mechanism was able to preserve the wrong scientific consensus regarding the charge of the electron for only about three decades before it was overcome by new results.)
Obviously, none of this discussion is a good fit for Twitter.
> rather than waiting for a central authority, financed with other people's money, to give up on one and pick up the next when it finally gets over its ego.
Arguably, currently the ego problem is very real with the individuals who hold power in academia due to status quo. I don't think the development of science would significantly change even if there was a central authority - it might even speed up, since the people making the decision would not have their careers dependent on preserving the current consensus.
Good news for you. Here's a direct quote from their post, which I believe their blog is currently down so don't blame you for not finding it:
> To better serve these conversations, misleading advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our inappropriate content policy.
Oh I don't fault Twitter in particularly, just whoever decided on the title of that specific article (so I guess the AP people in this case). Like, if an article was titled "Science says you should stretch more!" but then in the article, they just cite a specific study, I would still be slightly annoyed by that.
It's just a nitpicky pet peeve that I think reveals some epic underlying truth about the cycle of human civilization (but probably doesn't)
That's more honest, but also more obviously problematic. Thank God publishing platforms didn't prohibit contradicting the scientific consensus on, say, Newtonian physics in the early 20th century.
I think your point of view is a valid one, but I saw my role with my comment on just correcting facts. They hadn't realized that Twitter had in fact used the word "consensus." I was not offering a view either way. In that spirit, I'd also note for you that this new policy applies specifically to advertising. Not to what you can post. You can still be opposed to this policy, for reasonable reasons, but just to clarify.
But wasn’t the scientific consensus already that Newtonian physics was unable to explain certain observations, i.e. everyone already knew Newtonian physics was false? It’s not like Einstein just published a paper that said “nuh uh, all the experts are full of shit and here’s why…” and then proceeded to use powerful rhetoric to convince everyone they had been wrong.
"It’s not like Einstein just published a paper that said “nuh uh, all the experts are full of shit and here’s why…” and then proceeded to use powerful rhetoric to convince everyone they had been wrong."
Of course not. He made a YouTube video with the title "10 reasons why Newtonian physics is WRONG that the MAINSTREAM MEDIA doesn't want you to know!!!" and appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast.
I have a feeling that "contradict science on climate change" will only go one way. For example, economists agree that effects of climate change would be very small (compared to the world's economy) or even positive. David Friedman even thinks that climate change might be a *net positive* for the economy [1][2]. Is Twitter going to ban ads that say climate change will be a catastrophe?
For people that are lost on how climate change could be positive: it causes higher crop yields, and increases the temperature in cold regions (saving people from freezing to death and saving huge amounts of energy in heating).
Economists have performed many analyses on these and the conclusions indicate the consequences of climate change are much more mild that what the media, NGOs and politicians propagate. It's revolting that institutions have kept this scientific analysis away from the general population and have been feeding us political hysteria instead. The fact that even educated, rational, successful engineers in Hacker News are not aware of these data is another argument for why Twitter shouldn't be censoring ads in this political way.
Macroeconomics really strains the definition of 'science'. Few economists would place their field's predictive or descriptive power anywhere near that of chemistry, physics, biology, and all the other hard sciences that are part of climate science and the analysis of its effects. And I haven't yet seen people in the fact checking / 'allowable speech' sphere bring up most any social sciences as being settled or beyond reproach enough to take down content.
Given that there are so many unknowns about the extent of the nth-order effects of climate change (e.g. ecosystem collapse), I find it laughable that economists have a macro model that has any level of certainty to it. They can't even get relatively static situations correct, let alone literally world-changing ones.
> Which economy? Certainly not the ones that are getting destroyed by "biggest ever recorded" tropical cyclones.
The literature is mixed on whether climate change is really the cause on these recent natural disasters and, if it is, on how it impacts those disasters (e.g. reducing the frequency of the disasters, changing their location, etc).
> Maybe he meant Sweden finally being able to grow and export bananas?
Your example of Sweden is a rich country, but most of the increases in crop production would take place on developing countries - and that is a big deal for them.
Massive crop failures across poorer equatorial regions have become increasingly regular.
Longer, harder, droughts, and then extreme water events that can’t retain much of the water causes other problems beyond just floods.
Economists have historically proven to be extremely inaccurate at predicting long term patterns. They also have a strong bias in favour of business, so always find “supporting evidence” for almost any choice creating immediate gains for business.
An easy measure is: has any major economic “study” ever supported raising taxes for businesses or the rich? Have they supported investing in employee welfare? Universal healthcare? Etc
In countries that have done this, and thus actually measured the outcomes, they have found things have improved for the majority of people.
In countries that have followed the “reduce taxes and services” to improve society we have for decades seen the exact opposite, and yet economists still claim that life will improve for people. Again, this is despite decades of direct contrary evidence.
Economics is a fiction, the only actual supported piece of economic theory is supply vs demand. That’s it.
I think you are mostly focused around neo-classical economics which took over in the 70s and basically postulates perfect free markets and perfectly rational actors which we don't have.
When it comes to taxes it is actually quite ironic. People do behave like "rational" actors because the problem space is so small, they vote for lower taxes.
I think we should take a step back and adopt an economic system that treats money as a medium of exchange, not a tool to indebt people. Land as a medium of housing, not as a tool of segregation. Patents and copyright as a medium of innovation, not as a tool for crippling competition.
From what I can tell, none of that matters, people want to be the "king" and everyone else to be the "serfs", despite the fact that it is quite obvious that giving everyone the freedom to decide for themselves and utilizing the brains of billions of people is better than the brain of one.
Come on now, you're just being silly. "Yeah the ecosystem collapsed and everything's dying, but GDP is off the charts from all the cleanup work we're paying people to do!"
Considering humanity's desire for space exploration, not investing in climate change mitigations has negative effects on the economy outside earth.
In fact, I would argue that the success of capitalism relies purely on its ability to force people to invent things that would appear pointless from a first glance. Yes, all those stupid startups that are failing are there to win the technological progress lottery. Meanwhile other economic models won't play the lottery which has a significant cost over the short term and be happy in some local minima.
I guess this shows the slippery slope fallacy isn't always fallacious.
The problem with "consensus" as a measure is that consensus is always moving. We need to encourage professional and laypersons alike to embrace the freedom to be wrong as everything is wrong until it is right.
And what constitutes consensus? If Mazda puts out an ad saying that ICE cars contribute less than transoceanic shipping, is that acceptable? It's factual, but it goes against the consensus that ICE cars need to be eliminated.
I get this is ads, not user generated content, though the chilling effect is there.
I disagree. I think that platforms have some sort of responsibility to vet the ads who run on their platform. Not just for science or politics but in general.
1/2 of the reason I have used an adblocker for 20 years is because of how often straight-up malware has made it onto advertising networks because of a lack of vetting.[1]
There's a discussion to be had about twitter and social media removing posts and posters but I don't feel like this is that discussion. I feel like this is a positive (or at least neutral) development.
The difference being that these days we at least pay lip service to the scientific method and reproducibility.
I'd much prefer to rely on that than on what some disinformation-fed Q-anon supporter proposes. And I'd prefer to not give bad actors (eg folks who spread anti-vaccine disinformation) a platform at all.
Freedom of speech in advertising means you are paying and have a monetization strategy. That is more commonly known as fraud and many systems might ultimately penalize platforms when they catch up with their being new outlets for new frauds.
Maybe cigarettes are the new health food! Maybe, but if the consensus is no it is unethical and hopefully illegal to present a case as a cigarette manufacturer directly to the people as a run around of systems of critique. Each member of the public can't be individually expected to resist all logical fallacies that are profitable cons, no?
In what way is that factual? The data I can easily punch up at the moment indicates global shipping emitted 1 billion tons of CO2 in 2020 and automobiles emitted 3 billion tons.
> I guess this shows the slippery slope fallacy isn't always fallacious.
No, it’s still always fallacious. The argument “it’s going to rain today because it’s Saturday and it always rains on Saturday” is fallacious even on the occasions that it does rain on Saturday.
In contrast, I get downright scared when people are allowed to use their money to pay for a louder voice and potentially interfere with discussions around science or politics. That's both immoral and dangerous.
> ICE cars contribute less than transoceanic shipping
It's not factual, unless you are talking about bullshit measurement that focus on sulfur pollutants that we accept on the middle of the ocean because they do almost not damage there (and have no relation at all with Global Warming).
Awesome. Finally someone decided to ban something that's actually unambiguously bad, useless, and materially harmful.
Even with Trump, whose banning I support, you could argue there was some value in knowing what the President had on his mind.
I really don't need to know what Exxon's PR hacks want me to believe about climate change, even just for informational value. I'm extraordinarily well-aware of what they want me to think and why.
Some things are just evil, and they become more evil and more powerful the more you feed them. Hitler was one. Exxon talking about climate change is another.
I think it's interesting to know what Exxon's PR is thinking, though I don't think money spent is the right way to prioritize their thoughts vs anything else
Exxon's PR is always thinking FUD, such as "banning our anti-scientific PR ads is a slippery slope towards banning all science (because who can tell the difference between new revolutionary theory that upends thousands of peer-reviewed papers in 280 characters, and our lies)".
Another voice here not happy about this. It’s as if the advocates here have no interest in learning anything from the history of science as a practice of argument by evidence. Banning arguments doesn’t convince anyone paying attention that the opponents are wrong it just makes people suspicious that the banners can’t defend their positions.
That's like saying banning electing of representatives by a show of hands in favour of the secret ballot is just a slippery slope to banning democracy altogether.
It only feels like a slippery slope if you make no attempt to think about why Twitter is a bad place for certain kinds of debate, and instead assume that whatever traits make Twitter bad for that generalize to the entire public sphere.
It seems like a slippery slope to say that Twitter must promote any message, regardless of content.
Surely if Twitter has to publish content, it would be reasonable to require The New York Times to publish, and promote, an article from Storm Front. Or require Fox to publish, and promote, actual Climate Science content.
Twitter is not even halting the argument, they’re just refusing to artificially promote it above other content.
In what way is forcing companies to promote misinformation, cons, and deliberate deception not an attack on their freedom of speech?
In what way is not being required to promote something “banning arguments”? Twitter isn’t banning idiots spouting idiot views, anymore than it’s really banning white supremacy.
It seems a lot of people are responding to this from the 'allowable speech' and 'consensus is bad' perspective, which triggers the inevitable 'its a private platform' or 'its just one place' response.
We should be looking at this from a threat model perspective. That certain subjects, at certain times, are subject to coordinated threats in order to gain power to those coordinating them. This isn't about 'scientific consensus', this is a known set of threat actors following a known playbook to spread FUD, 'flood the zone with shit', etc, for known reasons.
Any human effort at scale is going to be subject to some amount of threat noise trying to get in the way of signal. We overcome these with institutional antibodies, things like practices and protocols and checks and balances (hopefully made transparent). We try to lower the noise floor so that the quality stuff is encouraged and sticks around.
I feel like a lot of complaints fall back to unrealistic idealism because they don't have the insight on what the decision making apparatus is, where it is empowered and where it is limited, and how decisions were reached. That's a problem, but arguing that threats shouldn't be addressed is not the solution, because we already know how that plays out in institutions, communities, and societies. They fall apart.
There are good theoretical arguments against this in the comments, but I wonder whether in practice there have been occurrences where ads were useful in challenging the scientific status-quo and advancing science?
It seems like in practice, this policy is primarily designed to prevent stupid politicians that deny science to advance their agenda or maybe snake-oil vendors that use ads denying science to sell their shit. Both of those are a good thing to me.
The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth, and you were put under house arrest if you published anything contradicting that.
Then there was that scientific consensus that margarine was good for you and eggs caused heart attacks.
Or that scientific consensus that disease could be cured by draining the bad blood out of your body.
Or that scientific consensus that if you sailed west too far, you'd fall off the edge of the world.
Or my favorite scientific consensus that in order to ensure a good harvest, it was necessary to chop the hearts out of your enemies and offer it to the gods.
Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant.
The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Science relies heavily on a consensus of observations and a consensus on the analysis of those observations. Reproduction is creating aa consensus
Plenty of scientists have broken with consensus without a new consensus forming around their models.
"Scientists have consensus about X" is something science communicators say. It's about how easy it is to describe the evidence to laypeople than what the evidence is.
> The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth ...
Ever thought about why it took so long for this particular "scientific consensus" was reverted? Because geocentrism could explain the motions of planets pretty accurately, and the easiest actual evidence of heliocentrism was that apparent locations of stars should move very slightly following the motion of the Earth (i.e., parallax) - the effect was so small that the first measurement was made in 1838, about 200 years after Galileo's death. Until then, the apparent absence of parallax was a scientific evidence against heliocentrism.
The lesson to draw is that it's not sufficient to have its proponent put under house arrest in order for a new theory to be accepted by the scientific community. Your new theory has to first explain all the things explained by the existing theory, and then some more that can not be explained by the existing one.
I'll leave it to readers to conclude what that means in the context of global warming.
Honestly I'm depressed by the level of discourse here. Otherwise mostly intelligent people are basically resorting to "Well some groups of people have been wrong about various things before, which proves that this particular (unrelated) group of people can be wrong, so instead of addressing the problem they say we have, let's debate for the umpteenth time whether the problem is real, again."
It's a classical stalling tactic, and IMHO the only proper response is "Get out, adults are talking."
I'm sad you've entirely misunderstood my point. I thought it was obvious.
The point is, no matter how sure you are that you're right, you might still be wrong. If you suppress opposing viewpoints, you're also suppressing any evidence that you might be wrong.
There are also people who know they're wrong - they suppress dissent because the truth will remove the power they enjoy.
Nobody likes being wrong. It's soooo much easier to just suppress any hint of being wrong.
The only way we'll know the truth is to allow dissent. Suppression of dissent is what tyrants do.
> If you suppress opposing viewpoints, you're also suppressing any evidence that you might be wrong.
So what is your proposal? Twitter should continue spending their money on promoting something which may lead to millions of people dying? Or is it something else?
My viewpoint is that your reasoning is incredible naive, well into the area of stupidity.
Galileo's problems weren't due to his findings and theories going against the current consensus. Galileo's problems were a combination of:
1. His heliocentric theory wasn't actually noticeably better at explaining observations than the current geocentric theories. Galileo, like the Church, believed in a universe intelligently designed by an all-powerful God, and he believed that said God would of course choose laws of physics that were mathematically beautiful and elegant. He had to hand wave away things that didn't fit with his notion of mathematically beautiful and elegant as optical illusions or observational error, which is not very convincing.
2. His ego. He was a celebrity who was frequently invited to hang out with the rich and powerful, which he loved.
3. He was an asshole. He was very intolerant of and rude to those he considered to be his rivals or his inferiors (and because of his big ego "inferiors" included pretty much everyone else).
4. He had a very poor sense of politics. He failed to realize or ignored that some of those rivals or inferiors that was a major asshole towards either were politically powerful or had better connections than he did to politically powerful people, and they could cause that power to be used to make his life miserable if he kept being a major asshole to them.
There's a great detailed look at the road to replacing geocentricism with heliocentricism here [1].
Those were problems for the Ptolemaic system, but were not a problem for Tychonic system. Tychonic cosmology had a stationary Earth with the Sun and Moon orbiting Earth, and the other planets orbiting the Sun.
In Galileo's time there really wasn't good evidence to pick between Copernicus and Tycho. The new evidence only knocked out Ptolemy. The debate between fans of Copernicus and fans of Tycho was still largely philosophical and religious.
The distinction here is between droplets and aerosol transmission. As I understand it, droplets are relatively large chunks of water (or whatever), and aerosols are particles in suspension in a gas. At the beginning of the pandemic, most scientific professionals assumed that COVID-19 was transmitted by droplets; the 6 foot distancing advice comes from that assumption, since droplets don't have much range.
(Which is not to say that increasing distance didn't help, but 6' wasn't a magic number.)
Exactly, it's like how the current scientific consensus is that the earth is round, but many enterprising individuals are busy trying to prove their theory that the earth is flat.
Yes. I think clearly wrong and/or fraudulent people should not be held up as equals to experts. We have in fact learned some things in the last few centuries.
I must say I find it quite dishonest and hypocritical to use examples of theories which didn't impact humans' lives at all, or, if they did, only on the level of an individual -- to use these examples as a comparison with climate change. These beliefs have nothing to do with climate change which effects have already started being visible for decades now. This has nothing to do with medicine, it's biology, geology, meteorology. Hundreds of species are disappearing, sea level rises are undeniable, temperatures are rising as well and forest fires are increasing. These are facts.
Several things, but to name one, none of those examples are actually representing “scientific consensus” (except for the margarine example, and medical science is notoriously tricky and subject to lots of noise and false signals).
Science didn’t even “exist” until the 1600s - well after the timeframes of nearly all of those examples. [0]
Your examples demonstrate “social consensus”, “religious consensus”, “proto-medical consensus”, but not “scientific consensus.”
[0]: a note that to say “science started at time X” is subjective, of course, but the modern formal framework of science is relatively new and putting it around the time of Isaac Newton’s Principia is probably a good rough guess.
I would not consider Galileo to be a representative of modern science, more of a precursor.
Whatever consensus you wish to call it, it was the consensus of those in power in society at the time that believed they knew the truth.
Galileo was a scientist whether scientist was a recognized term at the time or not. He made observations, and developed theories based on those observations. That's science.
George Washington's death was hastened by doctors who bled him, 200 years after 1600.
And how about Darwin's theories, Lysenkoism, Phrenology, etc.?
"science' in this context is essentially a form of religious dogma.
Who is twitter to say that science is settled, done and dusted? This is just the latest version of torturing people considered heretics to force them to recant their views and is antithetical to western liberal concepts of free speech, discussion and evolution of ideas
Scientism as the new religion. This gradual shift from the feeling-based dogmas to dogmas based on shallow knowledge is, in fact, a sign of progress, that the majority of the populace starts putting knowledge before feelings.
What's weird is that until COVID, scientism was on the way out of favor, with the sidelining of the New Atheists (Tyson, Hitchens, et al). It's funny how the movement managed to get revived just before it stepped through the pearly gates, as it were.
A step in the right direction towards banning all untruthful ads!
But wait, since advertising is almost exclusively lies, then Twitter might ban all ads! That would be great! Elon would have to finance all Twitter operations out of pocket, but he can afford it, it's a drop in the bucket for the world's richest, and therefore smartest, man!
The Usenet experience says that people just melt away if too much ads/spam/pr0n show up. Of course, Usenet had a larger amount of externalization than Twitter does: Twitter runs its own infrastructure, while Usenet was almost entirely on participating sites' infrastructure. The situation is a little different. Even so, I expect that we'll find out what the Twitter ad/spam/grift tipping point is.
Yeah, but then you publish your theory (along with supporting evidence!) in academic publications. Who ever heard of a scientist taking out Twitter ads to push their fringe theory directly to ordinary people?
Efforts to ban "misinformation" are gaining ground pretty much everywhere, with full-throated support by government institutions and at most given token resistance from social media companies, if that. Banning misinformation or heterodox opinions in ads is the initial step; does anyone, in good faith, truly believe that's where it will stop? Facebook and YouTube already warn about videos that mention certain topics, hence some YouTubers saying phrases like "Hope you're staying healthy in these trying times" in case the platform deranked them for saying COVID. Soon, as the ability for algorithms to understand context evolves, discussion and especially disagreement of such things at all will be heavily censored (I'm sorry, "downranked") by algorithms on such sites, until they are essentially invisible.
Also, it's not just about publishing papers. Scientists use Twitter to network and communicate their ideas with other scientists. To learn about what people are working on, interesting ideas in their field, and so on. If heterodoxy is banned from discussion, it becomes that much harder to challenge existing consensus, because they will be unable to communicate effectively with one another on public platforms.
Scientists use Twitter to get eyes on their papers, talks, and posters. No scientist's work would be meaningfully impacted by the dissolution of Twitter. We had conferences and journals before the web, and we'll have them long after whatever big tech darling of the moment is gone.
> does anyone, in good faith, truly believe that's where it will stop?
If you see the actions of Twitter, et al. as stemming not from a desire to flex power over society but merely as a desire to not be exposed to claims that they're profiting directly from and complicit in harmful disinformation campaigns, then it is reasonable to expect that they won't go too much further.
They've certainly dragged their heels thus far. They're clearly trying to put the minimum moderation effort to avoid getting hit by more serious public outcry or government interference, which naturally gives rise to a very error-prone moderation scheme.
>If you see the actions of Twitter, et al. as stemming not from a desire to flex power over society
Except I don't see that as being the source at all. Like I said, the support for these initiatives originates in government. Hence the government making much of their intent to further legislate and examine the operating models, algorithms, and moderation of these companies. Twitter, Alphabet, Facebook, etc are all acting defensively in response to these pressures, but in the process there's very little appetite to defend free speech proper (even the ACLU, I am given to understand, is not the same organization that at one time defended the KKK's right to march in the streets - although I can't remember too much of the noise around their supposed change in direction). The ratchet only ever goes one way.
Other companies are already modifying what discussion is allowed or disfavored on their platforms, as I noted in my post. They can see the headwinds clearly. As more governments discover the power of controlling the narrative, it will only be natural for them to apply pressure to companies that have the greatest power to modify that narrative. Institutions follow incentives just like every other agentic thing. They have an incentive to defend themselves and accumulate power, and so it is often useful to model them as (usually) taking actions that help them do that.
Note that I'm not saying that the President is going to call the CEO of Twitter and tell him, "Stop this whole 'Let's go Brandon!' thing." That's not really how it works. To paraphrase the editor of the NYT (iirc), "I've never had to kill a story my journalists wrote for political reasons." And neither, probably, did the editors of Pravda. Once you get to a certain level of awareness, and it's hard to believe the C-suite of these large tech companies lacking that, you have to be able to read the room, politically speaking, and know what the actual big players - the people with the real power - want out of you. Subtle alterations of reported reality is going to be the new normal. "What you're hearing and seeing isn't really what's going on" - a bit more terrifying to realize that that's the capability that's slowly becoming normalized.
So your claim is that nobody can honestly believe that social media companies would show increased opposition to increasing government pressure, and that it's obvious that the companies are willing to follow the governments all the way to totalitarianism—in spite of the resistance and reticence the companies have already shown? You really think it's that unreasonable to view this as a shifting of the equilibrium rather than an unchecked runaway process?
More or less, yes. I don't believe that these companies have actual principles to defend here; they act in self-preservation. If the government threatens to break up Google for spreading propaganda, it's going to stop spreading propaganda, however the government defines the category. PRISM wasn't that long ago. Gag orders exist. Do you think Fastmail is going to refuse to comply with the Assistance and Access Bill? To view this as a shifting equilibrium, I would need to see organizations arising as dedicated to opposing this process as there are those seeking to accelerate it. I don't believe they exist at the scale necessary to do so. Instead, I see a meme gaining ground that free speech itself is unnecessary or harmful - "freeze peach" at the mud-slinging lower end of the intellectual scale, and "the Paradox of Tolerance" at the higher end.
> then it is reasonable to expect that they won't go too much further.
Is it reasonable to expect that whatever social/political forces have pushed them to do this will stop there?
It makes no difference really if Twitter is out in front leading this or being dragged along kicking and screaming against their will. Is there reason to think "okay you can all stop worrying it's definitely stopped here and won't go any further"?
Reminds me of the old south park episode where 2 ultra scientific factions fight over some silly religious-like details.
Science shouldn't be treated like a religion. Consensus in science changes all the time. New things are discovered and invented by Goin against the concensus.
Right, my fear with treating climate change as “settled, absolute, unquestionable wisdom” is that this puritanical attitude towards science potentially stymies researchers from postulating radical new ideas, or prevents other researchers from taking radical ideas seriously.
To be clear, anthropogenic climate change is definitely a thing, and those who say it isn’t are either gaslighting or being gaslit.
But even though Newton was right, Einstein was “more right.” Could an Einstein exist in climate science today, going against the “Settled Science™?”
So climate change deniers are engaging in gaslighting, but you don't think we should do anything to stop them... because maybe one of them stumbles on a scientific breakthrough?
> So climate change deniers are engaging in gaslighting
Sometimes. Oftentimes they have just been lied to by political or cultural institutions that they trust.
> but you don't think we should do anything to stop them
It greatly depends on the context. In the case of ads on Twitter, I have no opinion as I'm not familiar enough with the nuances of this action to make a judgement.
> because maybe one of them stumbles on a scientific breakthrough
That's a misreading of my comment. My point was that a serious climate scientist may be afraid of pushing past the boundaries for fear of going against the very real orthodoxy. The orthodoxy, by the way, is a social thing, not a science thing. Many scientists have gotten 'cancelled' by randos on Twitter for publishing standard research.
the single biggest thing we can do to slow down climate change is to drastically rethink our zoning policy.
why do I need to get in a car and drive 10 minutes to grab some milk? because none of the land in the next few miles is zoned for a grocery store! We need to allow mixed use so that a lot of current errands that need a car could be easily performed on a bike.
I believe that CC is a problem that I am 100% behind but how do we avoid this piggy backing and hijacking of CC initiatives to further some other agenda? Say increase profit margins or green wash people? Just recently I stayed in a Marriott hotel and my entire experience was marred with CC warning labels everywhere from Toiletteries to free breakfast in the morning. You know what would be better for CC? That hotel to not exist in the first place. There is no end in sight and no limit to what can be done for CC. So you have this unlimited power from random authorities masquerading behind CC.
I think the problem with Climate Change movement is sort of like COVID. Restroom closed? Because COVID. Public Park Trail closed? COVID. Wtf!?
No one challenges it. No is allowed to. It has all these side effects.
We ought to double-down where things actually matter for the betterment of the planet and speak up against this other non-sense.
It doesn't seem that hard to differentiate "Marriott is washing towels less often to save money, not because they care about saving water" from someone claiming that climate change isn't happening...
It's a bandwagon thing. Founders and early joiners of a movement are very different from people who join after a movement is already successful/catching on (perhaps widely or perhaps in one area/subculture).
After something becomes so successful that you can't challenge it in any way (at least in some circles) it takes on the characteristics you describe. If someone pokes you in the eye and says it's for climate change, you can't say anything.
None of this has to do with the accuracy of the original movement. CC can be very real and abused by politicians and other opportunists.
Thank goodness science is in COMPLETE agreement when it comes to climate. I mean, if there was more than one scientific opinion about climate, then this ban would be ludicrous....
Scientists are not publishing ads on Twitter for their theories. Corporations are.
What people are defending is corporate consensus, because ultimately that's who puts up ads that contradict the current research around climate change. Corporations have reached a generalized consensus that climate change isn't a problem to worry about right now, because to accept the opposite means change that would affect their business and profits.
These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes scientific consensus can be artificially created through the use of corporate backers; but a little bit of logical deduction in this scenario should make it obvious that the people with the largest profit incentives are those that have a vested interest in claiming climate change isn't an issue.
That said, people arguing that scientific consensus doesn't exist is remarkably ignorant. It should take time and effort for any theory you publish to make its way to the forefront because otherwise you end up with a flood of charlatans, corporations and otherwise submitting bunk science in order to further their own profit or political motives.
A lot of people here are making arguments about the nature of science and consensus, but I suspect that for many, this is not a sincerely/consistently held belief.
For example, if the headline were instead “Twitter bans misleading ads for alternative medicine” (e.g. herbal teas that claim to cure cancer), we would not be seeing such strenuous objection.
Most "misleading ads for alternative medicine" are trying to sell a product (the "medicine" in question) not simply spread a belief. Ads trying to sell people things are usually subject to different standards than ads simply trying to influence their opinion without any direct connection to any commercial product or service. I think your claim that people are being inconsistent is ignoring this important distinction.
This is great. No longer will I need to see people claiming that climate is an existential threat, likely to snuff out human society by the end of the century. Oh wait, those aren't the untruthful extremists we're talking about?
They don't need to, they get organic tweets from any media publication.
I can't say I've seen ads denying climate change anyway, the closest I've seen was stuff from Exxon saying something climate change friendly trying to convince you they support green policies.
Everyone in this thread talking about how "science is never settled" and maybe that's true, but this move isn't designed to discredit some competing scientists, it's designed to shutdown bad-faith propaganda paid for by oil companies and other entrenched interests.
Curious how y'all would propose combating this type of misinformation. Or is this just something we should accept as a necessary evil on any platform?
Twitter needs to stop or be stopped. Censorship belongs to the government, not private institutions. Let the government pass legislation instructing Twitter about which speech is allowed. The government, at least in the US, is accountable to the people, but Twitter like other authoritarian regimes is accountable only to themselves.
So you want a more authoritarian government to clamp down on what businesses can and cannot do? Seems contrary to the freedom everyone on this website seems to be enamoured with. I’d expect private enterprises (emphasis on the word private) to be able to do just about whatever they want with their businesses in a “free” system.
No, I want the public square to be operated by and for the public. Twitter is squatting on the public cyberspace and I think it’s about time that the government stepped in and told them that if they want to monetize free speech, that they have to uphold free speech and cannot manipulate the environment unilaterally.
I know that “public cyberspace” is a weird phrase and hard to parse. I’m referring to the graph of communications between citizens of a country and between countries. In the US, this is a protected space, protected by our Constitution.
So far, all laws around censorship are that it is up to private individuals which ideas they want to promote, and which ones they don't.
Antitrust is a much better direction to tackle this kind of issue through. Twitter needs to be one way of seeing the underlying data, rather than having a monopoly on it.
The terms "progressive" and "conservative" have been completely stripped of meaning in our political discourse, (like "agile"!) but fundamentally they have a core meaning.
Progressive philosophy is to seek change to improve/fix problems, even with the risk that action can have side effects that also will need to be dealt with.
Conservative philosophy is to maintain the status quo and not take action to address problems even if they are causing harm - until we can establish all possible side effects can be dealt with. ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence )
Which is why it's so strange and disappointing to me to see the overall discourse on this site about Twitter and the steps they take to try to deal with misinformation on global society-impacting subjects like pandemics, vaccines, and climate change.
People are not wrong to worry about knock-on effects, but it's shocking to me that by default most of the comment upvotes suggest it's preferable to do absolutely nothing and offer no moderation of content like this.
This would never fly in our day-to-day jobs. If HackerNews is for startup enterpreneurs, being stuck in analysis paralysis is no way to build a startup. Progressive bias for action is the only available option.
Considering the sheer amount of toxic, dishonest, manipulative rage-fueled garbage that Twitter allows or algorithmically promotes every day on so many subjects, this specific ban reeks of sanctimonious hypocrisy to say the least.
All that aside from the simple fact that debate on such a complex subject should always be welcome (much like is the case with COVID and its vaccines, in which case it's possible to be against mandates while not arguing aginst the clinical value of vaccination in general), even if it includes points of view from deep within the denier camp. I don't doubt the science behind the reality of human-caused climate change, but even if some people do, rules like this will do nothing to make debate better, or spread better reasoning wider and further. They'll do the opposite, and only entrench bad ideas, rigid formalisms and ideological camps.
Furthermore, there is indeed plenty of room for debate on policies, specifics, ranges and other aspects of climate change without one sinking into full blown denial of established evidence and data.
Does saying "Passenger vehicles account for ~7% of emissions and thus switching to EV's will not make a significant difference" count as disagreeing with science?
Scientific consensus on climate change is pretty well defined. Is anyone saying that messages that contradict them are correct sometimes and so Twitter is wrong in this action? Corps have been abusing capital to amplify their speech intentionally misleading public on this subject regardless of its harm. This imho is the right move.
This is good news. Misinformation is cheap to produce and expensive to combat once it's out there. My opinion is that the only effective approach is to deplatform it entirely, as early in the process as possible.
Yeah, Orwell was definitely a big proponent of advertiser rights. Page one of 1984 is basically a damning indictment of how the Thought Police limit advertisers on social media, as I recall.
Bloodletting and the practice of medicine as a whole both predate organized science. Transforming medicine into a scientific discipline is an incomplete work in progress, and discarding bloodletting is one of the consequences of that transition.
I think we should all be going in for our weekly blood filtering. Or maybe we can develop a wearable blood filter which we change periodically. Just be careful when you change it though.
> Twitter says it will no longer allow advertisers on its site who deny the scientific consensus on climate change, echoing a policy already in place at Google.
Maybe someone should tell twitter, google, etc that science isn't supposed to work on consensus. Politics works on consensus. And when you mix politics with science, you get social darwinism/scientific racism/etc.
> Twitter said it would provide more information in the coming months on how it plans to provide “reliable, authoritative context to the climate conversations” its users engage in, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The U.N.-backed science panel’s reports on the causes and effects of climate change provide the basis for international negotiations to curb climate change.
The good old authoritarian, I mean authoritative sources. It's amazing how the entire establishment political/media/tech/etc all rallied around "authoritative sources". It's almost like someone flipped a switch and it's become a national mantra. "Authoritative sources", "authoritative sources", "authoritative sources".
A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. Seems very trustworthy to me.
Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts. When the experts on a topic don't have consensus, we say the science is undecided. When they have consensus, we call that science settled.
And for the science to change under new evidence, again the consensus of experts is required, otherwise the new change remains on the fringe.
How can the consensus ever change if we deplatform, defund, and ostracize all scientists (or would-be scientists) researching and publishing any evidence that contradicts consensus?
This is risible. Next we'll cry a tear for all the good scientists who can not get heard with their findings that Tobacco is harmless after all?
There has been concerted funding and propaganda _against_ the science by an industry that is literally earning billions a week.
Others have already pointed out that it's always been hard to go against the consensus in science. It's supposed to be hard. The consensus became the consensus for a reason. Overthrowing it is a monumental effort that gets you into the history books.
This is not what this is about and this is not what is going on here though. In the 80s serious scientists debated man made global warming. They raised objections, and contradicted the models. Eventually all the reasonable and important objections were addressed. The debate settled. The evidence came in. We now have 30 years of observational data on top of that!
And _now_ people complain that there is no scientific debate! No one was paying attention when the debate happened! That's why you are getting the conclusion! That's why people who object are told "Yeah we covered this, check the papers." Which doesn't feel like debate but in reality just shows that the person coming in hasn't done their due diligence or isn't arguing in good faith.
I think you'll find that as soon as researchers began looking into the harmful effects of smoking, the link to cancer quickly became the scientific consensus. It did not become the popular consensus for decades because of the indefatigable opposition campaign funded by the tobacco companies.
I am not disagreeing with your points. I was just trying to point out the consensus can be wrong and the consensus can change.
The problem I have with this is they will almost certainly allow things that contradict the consensus. Let's say the consensus is like 2C increase in 50 years. If somebody says it will actually be 3C they would be contradicting the consensus but probably would be allowed the ad. If somebody says it will only increase 1C they would probably not be able to sell an ad.
Yeah, consensus changes. Especially when new evidence and new ideas arise. That shows that scientific consensus is working.
If the scientific consensus threatens assets and income of powerful industries they run massive lobbying and ad campaigns against it and try to interfere with the scientific process itself by funding biased studies.
Pretending like the people that exaggerate the effect of climate change are a comparable issue is dishonest and not backed by facts. Classic false symmetry fallacy.
Also, the scientific consensus is conditional: If we emit like this, then that will happen. The IPCC report doesn't predict a certain amount of warming.
> Don't forget that the consensus used to be that tobacco was harmless
No? Tobacco companies themselves knew tobacco wasn't harmless. Just like oil companies have known for almost a century that humans were causing drastic climate change due to CO2.
I don't think tobacco companies knew 100 years ago. The data didn't really become conclusive until something like the 50s. There absolutely was a consensus in the 20s and 30s that cigarettes were not harmful.
Even without any of the more modern forms of deplatforming, defunding or ostracization, people have been concerned for at least several decades about an inability for new ideas to make inroads and change overall scientific consensus or understanding.
I am speaking of the idea often described as "science progresses one funeral at a time" - which Wikipedia informs me is sometimes known as "Planck's principle"
It doesn't, and I was not claiming anything like that. In fact I wasn't making any claim about anything at all. I was just pointing out some broader context that the way ideas spread and consensus forms or changes is a messy and human process and always has been, and that it's something people have been thinking about for a long time already, so there are plenty of ideas to read about the topic for anyone who is interested in it.
If you do want a claim, my personal opinion is that Twitter's choices to ban or allow certain advertising will make no noticeable difference to the progress of scientific understanding, because I don't think adverts on Twitter are a communication channel that matters for the spread of ideas within academic communities. I can imagine that over time it might make a difference to lay-people's beliefs about some things, although I'm not sure whether Twitter has a broad enough audience to really change much here. Since I personally am fully onboard the "climate change is real, and it's real bad" train, I don't have any problem with Twitter banning adverts that spread the opposite idea. If it was a ban on what general Twitter users can post then I would have a problem with it, but I'm ok with a ban on adverts. Maybe that's inconsistent of me, I don't know.
Hypothetically: a study finds racial differences in intelligence, or something equally taboo.
Do you really believe an esteemed journal would actually publish it? Or would they find a reason to politely decline, such as "it's out of scope", "didn't pass peer review", "doesn't align with out values, reword"?
Do you believe, even if the study is published, that it would not destroy someone's career?
And finally, if researchers believe there is a chance of that happening, would they actually start to investigate the taboo area?
My answer to all these questions is "no". This is why when you say, "just publish in academic journals", I am highly skeptical. And why I am annoyed at yet another example of the social media oligarchy enforcing what ideas are allowed to propagate.
Emil Kirkegaard? That's your example? Did you dig that out not knowing who he is, or did you post it with full knowledge of who he was, hoping HNers wouldn't actually look at who he is?
> Emil Ole William Kirkegaard is a Danish far-right eugenicist, perjurer[3] and activist for legalising child pornography. He has a wide range of crank views and is a global-warming denier, anti-feminist, ableist, anti-vegan, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe and has promoted white supremacy. He is most notorious and obnoxious online for his ableism and calling transgender people, liberals, feminists and pretty much anyone with left-wing political views who merely disagrees with him as "mentally ill".
> Aside from his controversial writings on eugenics and race, Kirkegaard has been involved in other activities such as publishing personal data of 70,000 OKCupid users without permission, including their sexual preferences,[10] considered by Vox to be "without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases".[11] His writings on race and intelligence[12] have caused controversy and because peer-reviewed journals refuse to publish his work, he set up the OpenPsych pseudojournals.[13] However, after this journal was discredited he now publishes pseudo-scientific race articles in the open-access Psych journal.[14][15]
[...]
> His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics. Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be "self-taught in various subjects"
[...]
> Kirkegaard’s own personal blog is home to topics such as "Is miscegenation bad for your kids?" and how one could empirically verify a Jewish conspiracy
Emil Kirkegaard tried to sue one of the article writers but lost the libel suit - he put himself nearly £40,000 in debt and in contempt of court.
https://oliveratlantis.com/emil-kirkegaard/
1) Ad hominem; even if it were an accurate claim, it would also be an irrelevant one.
2) You're broadly dismissing factual statements as "claims" with no supporting evidence. Given the statements on RW are backed extensively by citations, please support "a lot of claims about him are a stretch" with citations of your own.
3) I take it your "hypothetical" example about race and intelligence isn't actually hypothetical but something you actually believe?
Emil Kirkegaard tried to sue one of the writers of that article, lost the libel suit and got himself nearly £40,000 in debt. He's now being counter-sued:
https://oliveratlantis.com/emil-kirkegaard/
> Do you really believe an esteemed journal would actually publish it?
You seem to be forwarding an idea of an information ecosystem where what is an "esteemed" journal is static. Like you cannot imagine Nature being anything but the top journal - so Nature must publish works they find suspect because otherwise nothing will change.
Frankly, that's not how anything works. Groups of people organize around beliefs and there is a relatively stable (but shifting) understanding of the prestige of those organizations. Look at, for instance, the understanding around the stonewall riot / protest (depending on who is describing it). If these heterodox views are correct (and for the record I think the race 'science' that claims to show non-white people consistently test below white folks is obviously and embarrassingly wrong. I encourage you to check out this critique of the bell curve[1]) then they will, over time, become more and more accepted and their articles in "alternative" journals will be key in that process.
The way that previously alternative views have come to the center is that they were published in their own "fringe" publications for years - and then, over time, as those view were more and more accepted, the papers start appearing in 'mainstream' publications. The "years in the wilderness" is a feature not a bug! You have to let subaltern movements develop their own ideas and voice outside of the mainstream to see if they really have a substantial critique of the mainstream - because inevitably any real critique involves getting the mainstream to let go of one or more central axiom of their worldview.
If you are serious about supporting these ideas (and I really hope you are using 'race science' as an attention grabbing flash point rather than a thing you believe), you really should start talking about them like you're aware of the history of how previously controversial ideas become mainstream.
half your comment is spent debunking my "claim". You cannot even discuss discussing taboo ideas.
>The "years in the wilderness" is a feature not a bug!
You just invented that. Never have I heard a suggestion that for a new theory to become mainstream, you must first create a new fringe journal that can exceed the existing journals in reputation.
In fact, I can think of several examples of brand new findings that upended the mainstream that were published directly in Nature or Science.
You literally just invented this entire process just to give a reason why politically taboo ideas are unpublishable.
This is a silly hypothetical for a number of reasons.
1. There are a million reasons it could be rejected. For one thing, we have decades if not centuries of terrible science here, motivated by even worse agendas. A journal is going to be extremely skeptical of any study in this area for that same reason, and they would be for anything much less controversial that had centuries of garbage behind it.
2. Science is not morally exempt. A journal may ask themselves if the scientific implications of this paper are worth the practical implications of supporting the work at that stage - that's going to depend a LOT on the paper itself, and since this is a hypothetical, we have no way of discussing this point.
> Do you believe, even if the study is published, that it would not destroy someone's career?
I don't know, maybe? Again, it's a hypothetical. What is this paper showing? Who is it by? There's so much context missing here. I'd certainly think whoever did this research, with no other context, is probably an idiot, but I could be convinced otherwise.
> And finally, if researchers believe there is a chance of that happening, would they actually start to investigate the taboo area?
Maybe? Like, yeah, good point, I would definitely question the motives of anyone doing this research. But this is a hypothetical so it's impossible to say.
> My answer to all these questions is "no".
Given this extremely broad hypothetical it seems pretty absurd to answer any way definitively.
Regardless, this in no way supports the idea that the research rejected by journals is somehow fit for Twitter ads. It is, at best, a criticism of journals, without any comment on what the right solution would be.
The idea that advertising on Twitter is somehow the bandaid we need for purported issues with scientific peer review is absolutely fucking laughable and I think people on HN should seriously question the competency of the average user here.
This is it. The conclusions should match the weight of the evidence being written about, and that of existing papers. This can be seen with semi-recent FTL neutrino experiment… it was probably a faulty cable. There are often many reasons for counter evidence that explain it better than changing the current understandings. That has to be worked through first, and isn’t a headline grabbing process.
that's how dissent in science has always been treated, going back to things like "the earth is round". i'm not saying it's the best system, but it's not new. historically, science gets it right in the end, but shifting the scientific consensus is a long and slow process that happens among scientists, not something that uninformed masses contribute to in any meaningful way.
the barrier to getting widespread acceptance of your dissenting theory is much higher than for getting widespread acceptance of your theory that matches the status quo.
i don't think it's obvious that there's a benefit to making it easier to promote ideas that contradict the generally accepted science. if it's correct, smart people will eventually be convinced of that. promoting fringe theories on twitter amongst people who have no underlying knowledge of the subject matter won't do anything to advance the most correct ideas, only the loudest ideas or the ideas that most match our pre-existing biases.
> if it's correct, smart people will eventually be convinced of that.
That's not how science has historically worked. Smart people won't be convinced, new people will. Status quo changes when the previous generation is laid to rest.
This is the result of the academia being just another human social system obeying the same laws of power as all the rest, thus inheriting all their flaws.
Science has often worked like that. As an example consider Galileo's discovery of the phases of Venus. It immediately destroyed the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Even supporters of that system overwhelmingly immediately abandoned it.
There are plenty of cases where things have moved much faster than that - e.g. the adoption of QM and relativity, dark energy becoming a respectable hypothesis, plate tectonics, dinosaur extinction via impact... In each of these cases, either new evidence or a new explanation for previously-puzzling evidence was key.
Are you not conflating continental drift with plate tectonics? The former was, for several decades, not widely accepted on account of the lack of a plausible mechanism. The latter is not the theory that the continents drift, but it provided the missing mechanism for how they do. Acceptance of both was swift once the distinctive paleomagnetic patterning of the oceanic crust was discovered. This scientific revolution was data-driven.
Twitter is already pretty much the worst possible communication medium for engaging in scientific debate. Challenging scientific consensus in a way that is credible and easily distinguished from trolling or corporate PR requires a more in-depth discussion of facts and explanations than Twitter is designed to facilitate.
This is a fair argument but it seems like the proportion of climate deniers who are driven by bad faith massively outweight climate skeptics acting in good faith.
By presenting good evidence that the consensus is wrong, and then after the existing model is thrown into doubt, presenting a better model. But there actually has to be that evidence. Bogus evidence (such as that presented by global warming deniers) does not suffice.
If, as you say, not advertising on twitter doesn't mean you don't get to put your position forward then nothing of value is being lost by the twitter policy change.
If one side has a financial incentive to push bad faith arguments, whereas the other side has no financial incentive or resources and is just interested in science for the sake of science, then by supporting having the debate via twitter ads you've created a system that locks out one side.
That isn't what Twitter is banning. There are plenty of academics working to refine our knowledge around the climate. Conservatives who have dug into the full science have concluded that the consensus today has merit.
This is knowable.
It's like the difference between someone researching the exact strength of antibiotics and claiming that medicine doesn't work. One of those isn't science.
(Assuming the parent comment is normative/prescriptive rather than just descriptive) This is a dangerously wrong perspective. There are many beliefs that we consider laughably crazy today that were “settled” per the experts of the day.
Remember “Eppur si muove”? It is impossible to establish who the “experts” are by the old truths — we need the new truths for that.
To channel Max Planck, scientific revolutions happen not publication to publication but funeral to funeral as old experts die and people grow up with new truths.
The number of bad and wrong ideas stopped by this format vastly outnumber the few examples you think this format impedes.
The proper way to evaluate this system is not to cherry pick a few rare examples and claim it as the norm. The correct way is to take all inputs, true and false, and see the outcome. Then you compare this info to other systems that have been tried. And maybe propose new systems, but only after you understand the problems with previous systems that led to the current one so you don't simply repeat past errors.
No it doesn't. I can't believe people are even claiming this. Science has NOTHING to do with consensus. If evidence is produced that goes against a consensus then the consensus is wrong. Consensus has nothing to do with science. Consensus is a problem of humans that disrupts the scientific process.
> If evidence is produced that goes against a consensus then the consensus is wrong
To be more specific, then the consensus may be wrong. The bar to demonstrate that something is wrong and be taken seriously is meant to be higher than simply claiming one can produce evidence to the contrary.
When such evidence is discovered, the idea is that one would present that evidence to peers, who would attempt to replicate the findings, and support them if they are able to do so, or otherwise publish their counter-findings in response. This is obviously more complicated in practice because we're dealing with humans and not ideals (and thus we have things like the replication crisis), but that is the theory of how we advance the body of knowledge that we derive from scientific theses and experiments.
We do not advance it by claiming that evidence has been found and then leaving it at that, in a vacuum. So it's not exactly that science "works on consensus", in the sense that just a majority doesn't prove anything, but -- convincing, using evidence, the majority of the scientific community in your field, is certainly part of the process.
> Consensus is a problem of humans that disrupts the scientific process
No, no, consensus is the only reason we have science, or language, or much of anything humans find interesting. Let me explain:
Science is a thing humans do. Without humans around, I don't see ants doing science anytime soon :) When humans share the stuff they do and reach agreement, that is called consensus.
In other words, any word you use, it is because humans wanted to communicate and reach consensus, so they invented a word for it.
So you have it backwards, it's humans -> consensus -> science, not science -> consensus -> humans.
Worth remembering the scientific method relies on some sense of repeatable phenomena for idealized "experiment". Social science, medicine, astronomy, geology, earth science, each have their own axioms for what that means. (E.g., assume the universe is isotropic).
I don't think each of these are as solid as the other. Climate science is certainly less testable than say particle physics. Not that we shouldn't work together as humans to model, understand and keep our (only) planet stable as best we can.. but "scientific consensus" is less meaningful in this field.. used as a political word to motivate people at the expense of more nuanced understanding.
But like vaccines, it's probably better to act now before we understand it all.. (on the day before we go extinct).
Let say someone want to advertise natural gas as an green energy source. What is the consensus among climate researcher on that, and what does EU politicians consensus say? Which authoritative sources should we pick here?
Labotomies won the Nobel prize supported by the consensus.
Heliocentric theory and antiseptic theory was scoffed at by the mainstream.
Consensus is merely a guide, there's no such thing as settled science.
The reason is, we're studying an infinite universe with the limited technology and when that technology or that current mode of understanding changes, our entire understanding of the univ. changes.
> Science works on consensus, the consensus of experts.
This is scientistry, not science. Science works on observation and experiment. In a perfect world perhaps consensus would be established scientifically, but that’s observably at odds with the history of science.
That's like saying that software engineering is about typing. Observations and experiments are low-level activities you perform while doing science. Actual science works on higher levels.
Convincing yourself that your ideas are right is a low bar. The key part of doing science is convincing yourself that your ideas are wrong. It's about telling the difference between actually discovering something new and making mistakes in experiments and reasoning. If you fail to convince yourself, you ask others to convince you that your ideas are wrong. If they also fail, you are starting to build a consensus that maybe you have actually discovered something.
Believing in something that contradicts the consensus is politics. Building a consensus among experts who are skeptical but open to new ideas is science.
Thanks for the clear demonstration that the use of analogy is no substitute for reason.
The problem is one of confusion. There are at least three distinct things that we call science. Primus, the social enterprise itself. This is where “consensus” applies. Secundus, the method for understanding the rules governing the system of the world. This is where what you call “low level” activities are. Tertius, the body of accepted knowledge that’s been ascertained. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily follow from the scientific method. Sometimes it instead follows from the needs of the social enterprise of science, which we rather clumsily call politics.
It’s only by clearly and distinctly considering these three concepts that we can avoid frankly intellectually crippling confusion.
Laws aren’t based on consensus or age as we have plenty of Laws that are known to be wrong and stuff gets called a law fairly early.
F=MA fails really obviously at high velocity but the error doesn’t go away at low speed it just becomes small enough to be ignored. Even the most known Law of conservation of energy fails in expanding space time.
The basic rule of thumb is can you write a useful equation? And for climate change it’s just too complex for that.
This is absolutely and completely wrong. “Hypothesis -> Theory -> Law” is not actually the scientific pipeline. Theories and laws not only can co-exist, but often do.
From Wikipedia [0]:
> Scientific theories explain why something happens, whereas scientific law describes what happens.
An example of this is the theory of gravity [1], which contains laws of gravity [2].
1) Newton's Law of Gravity is not wrong, it is just incomplete. Newton's Law of Gravity is a critical formula used for calculating rocket trajectories and behaviors. It is correct but has 'boundaries' where Einstein's General Theory of Relativity takes over.
3)Dates for “Certain Doom”, with regards to the climate, have been proffered by prognosticators of climate science. Much like those that predict the religious End Of Time, these dates invariably pass with no notice or fanfare.
That’s a serious straw man argument. Where exactly do you see some “Certain Doom” prediction in say an IPCC report that’s predicted something beyond X equivalent CO2 results in Y temperature?
The 2022 version for example basically says 1.5C above preindustrial levels by 2025.
That’s not some doom that’s basically exactly where we are now and only relevant because the keep updating past predictions. Go back to reports from 1990 and 1.5C in 2025 is well within error bars. We are experiencing negative effects that could have been avoided in 1990, then again things could also have been worse before now without quite a lot effort into improving efficiency etc.
Predictions further into the future assume net emissions continue and therefore the effects will be worse. That’s not some “doom” that’s cause and effect. 1.5C, 2C, 2.5C, and even 3C, as long as net emissions continue we well eventually reach all of those milestones. Arguably what’s changing is 2025 and 2040 etc don’t seem to be in the distant future they way they seemed in 1990. Kids today are thinking they could be around in 2100.
I think wrongness is inherent to any well-proven theory, because each theory is a model.
It’s just understanding where the theory falls apart and where it makes accurate and useful predictions.
Like Newtonian physic. Even where it’s accurate, the math can get hard for very simple scenarios.
The classic three-body problem can be computed; but it’s also inherently chaotic so any computation quickly becomes inaccurate (sensitive to initial values).
I think they compute many different times with different initial conditions, to generate probabilities.
I imagine the climate science of “what happens” is also the same: We may not turn into Venus, but we also know all that excess heat and energy has to go somewhere and in our fragile global supply chain it won’t take much to make a disaster.
Still, I don’t like the quasi-religious aura that climate journalism has. It’s very off-puttingz
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Climate change is an unproven theory, far from the certainty that the political side of science makes it out to be.
For all intents and purposes until we have better modeling climate change is largely a political topic.
People for the most part have a pet form of energy generation they want the world to switch to and use wildly inaccurate climate models to beat everyone who disagrees with them over the head with.
See Germany and switching to oil and gas over climate friendly nuclear and trying to get gas added as a renewable form of energy and nuclear removed.
Also modelling basically anything is hard. Applying the laws of thermodynamics to a kettle well enough that you can predict it's exact dynamics is not a simple task.
This argument is so boring, it's the same every time.
"They can build their own Twitter!"
We have monopoly laws, they are not fundamentally at odds with liberty, they recognize that it's undesirable for society to have monopolies exercising market power. These need to be updated to reflect the current platform monopolies. Just like the phone company can't tell you what you can talk about on the phone, or railroads have to share their tracks under some conditions. Applying the same thing to Twitter and other bug tech platforms is a logical extension. The only difference is it would also involve the government/establishment giving up power
Nah. I don’t buy it. Don’t like Twitter? You have a few options:
1. Create a competitor.
Network effects here are tough. Inertia is a thing. But perhaps those Twitter users with your sentiments will follow you to your new platform. See ya!
2. Buy up enough shares to put yourself on the board. This is akin to “write your congress person”. Amounts to little.
3. Buy Twitter. Only folks crazy enough (see also Elon Musk) can do this. I say crazy because Twitter doesn’t make decent money and is fine without him in my opinion. But ownership is a sure fire way to change things.
Other options you could also pursue are:
4. Wax poetic on the internet about how since they’re the only game in town they need to be open to taking money from anyone and everyone. They also need to allow all forms of speech. This also amounts to nothing.
I guess a future Trump or DeSantis or Carlson or other Q affiliated presidency could along with a majority in congress force Twitter to do the things you’re advocating for. I sure hope not.
So yeah, if you build it they will come. So go build a competitor or join the myriad of others that operate in the extreme free speech/anything goes mantra. The rest of us will keep using Twitter and enjoying the relatively benign place it’s become since Trump was banned.
The outrage at one large corporation (Twitter) acting one way while implicitly defending other large corporations, e.g., Exxon-Mobil’s propaganda-spreading— seems a weird tightrope to walk. Not sure how large a problem small-business-climate-disinformation-spreading is.
> If you're interested in liberty here, you should be backing twitter's right to do this.
Indeed, so long as it isn't the government enforcing it on everyone, then the free market will come up with a competitor that will arguably start attracting those most aware of the importance of and aligned with freedom, freedom of speech - those people who arguably are on average much more highly competent and earning a higher income to be able to financially support a better model, and likewise bring their network(s) with them; I am working on launching such a competitor and believe I'm designing a platform model and launch/growth strategy that will work very well.
No one’s saying Twitter doesn’t have the right to do this. They’re saying it’s a bad policy and Twitter should choose to allow content it disagrees with. Silencing others is not Liberty.
That's a very difficult thing to moderate, to manage, and from personal experience Twitter doesn't even enforce their existing rules accurately.
For example, will posts denying the hysteria of climate change - let's say the ideology of climate change activism that has formed, perhaps fuelled by for-profit industrial complexes, perhaps also leveraged by some governments wanting to use fear to manufacture consent toward control - be ban on Twitter, will that be considered denial if they point out things like some parts of the world actually cooling - and "heat deaths" in those areas are actually going down? Climate change hysteria media seems to only want to report the increasing heat deaths annually, but not deducting the reduced deaths from the cooling areas.
Now I don't even know for 100% if the above is true, or how true it is, as I haven't had a chance to dive into some of the leaders of that effort who're supposedly trying to have a grounded, balanced conversation on climate - referencing data, etc.
An organization or individual claiming they can be or are an arbiter of truth is a recipe for disaster; what New Zealand Prime Minister once actually said comes to mind, that if you hear something not from government (about COVID, the pandemic) then it's not true.
Yeah they rallied around it since the alternative is to just put everyone on an equal platform. Gatekeeping is good in areas like climate science where certain groups have a large incentive to spew demonstrably false information about it.
Gatekeeping is not good, providing education and insight is good. If you gatekeep then you are essentially advocating for propaganda because that is how it will be used and has been used.
That might work when you’re not talking about advertising. The vested interests in the status quo are the most profitable organizations in the world. How can the average citizen or “save the climate group” compete?
Corruption won't go away through censorship. It will only make it worse. The best solution IMO is for truth and transparency and to have honest leaders shift focus to education.
What group doesn’t have a vested interest to spew demonstrably false information about it?
Climate change isn’t science it’s mostly politics around preserving or not preserving the temperatures and sea levels from when the steam engine was invented.
Like I believe the climate is changing, but we should do almost nothing about it. That said I don’t own any property within 7 feet of sea level so I don’t really give a shit if the people who do lose a little bit of their waterfront property.
> That said I don’t own any property within 7 feet of sea level so I don’t really give a shit if the people who do lose a little bit of their waterfront property.
Are you implying that those who are the most concerned about climate change are wealthy people afraid to lose their possessions?
How do you explain then that the wealthiest people, that is those possessing the greatest number of companies and contributing the most to climate change, are those that will do the least for climate change and will even fight to maintain the current economic model?
Most wealthiest people, big tech, big business, mainstream media are all backing climate change. Politicians have been trying to get political support for years to pass new taxes for that. Recently Europe bundled a bunch of climate change funds together with covid recovery and postponed that 10 years in the future.
Then, in terms of doing, I'm sure they will all find a way to make the middle class pay while the wealthiest pay zero like usual. And I'm also sure companies innovating will do way more to reverse co2 emissions and make renewables work than any western government will (China's dictatorship actually did some meaningful changes, especially in making solar cheaper; they must have been tired of pollution in the cities).
I don't think it's wealthy owners of seaside properties who are causing all this climate alarmism, I think it's the usual politicians who would never let a good crisis go to waste.
> Most wealthiest people, big tech, big business, mainstream media are all backing climate change.
They may indeed be backing it, but what are they really doing to fight it? Most of what's promoted by big businesses and such is just greenwashing. They solely talk about ecology for marketing purposes and to build their user base's loyalty.
How can one believe that Amazon seeks to "reach net-zero carbon by 2040"[1] while Bezos blasted into space just because he found it fun?
> I'm sure they will all find a way to make the middle class pay while the wealthiest pay zero like usual.
That's the problem and that's what I wanted my comment to highlight.
> I don't think it's wealthy owners of seaside properties who are causing all this climate alarmism, I think it's the usual politicians who would never let a good crisis go to waste.
There is no alarmism. I see how some politicians may leverage the catastrophic (and real) news about climate change, but that's not because they seek to use it to fulfill their interests that it's not real. The consequences of climate change have already started being visible. Just this morning I saw that forecasts were predicting up to 48-49°C in Pakistan and up to 46-47°C in India[2], this in April(!).
Sustainability is _only_ a waste management system that enables recycling rates of 90% or higher (which is damn hard). CO2 is also just one of many waste products, we totally dont care about, but _must_ to sustain our civilisation.
The earth has had higher CO2 levels… and had much more biodiversity when it did. If anything for a sustainable world for life we should probably be targeting the 800ppm of the Carboniferous and not the 200ppm of the little ice age.
Can you tell me why from a sustainability perspective why 200ppm is the ideal? Or if 200ppm is not the ideal what is the sustainable ideal, and why civilization collapses if we don’t reach that target?
I mean the totality of civilization not just that Buckingham palace or a few other places might be underwater? Like why can’t we build ports a little inland from Amsterdam? Why can Paraguayans survive 40C but civilization collapses if Europe goes above 27C.
The higher CO2 levels of long gone times where probably not even remotely a problem for those critters around, because evolution had plenty of time to do its thing. Your whole point of "but what about back then" is comparing apples with oranges.
Looking at the steep graph today, the increasing weather extremes and how brittle our supply chains are, i think its very appropriate to call it a climate catastrophe, we are heading for.
Btw. I was using the ideal of perfect recycling and applied it to CO2, no absolute or relative ppm value is relevant for this.
More often than not peer review acts as gatekeeping rather than actual analysis of the data and methods. The people who do peer review are often those with institutional political power rather than proper "peers".
This is such a bizarre take. Have you gone through the peer review process for a scientific paper? I have, and fairly reliably I’ve had experts in the field review the content and provide strong, thoughtful feedback. Maybe your particular subject field is more prone to politicking than mine? It’s hard for me to think of peer review as anything other than absolutely essential.
Science policy is different from science research, and similarly, medical policy is different from medical research. Policy is the intersection of technical craft and politics, and it ought be consensus-oriented.
That doctors almost entirely practice consensus-based medicine does not mean that medical research is halted, but it does mean that not all clinics are labs, and thus medical research is not advancing at peak speed.
That's exactly how you get people to buy statins for 50 years because the consensus is that cholesterol should be a certain number. Or covid vaccines for everyone x3. And I can't wait to see what taxes we'll need to raise to fight climate change.
If science and profits wouldn't have a chance to mix in there would be value in a shared policy. In the real world, you'd better pay a good doctor for advice (enough to offset big pharma) and hope that policy being enforced by "the people's" government won't break your bank too much.
> A UN backed science panel. Great. If there is one thing we all know about the UN, it's that the UN isn't political. An institution ruled by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France. Seems very trustworthy to me.
A solid philosophy of science is difficult to live up to in the real world, but I guarantee that "I don't know anything about the IPCC but I see it's organized through the UN so I know enough to dismiss it" is not it.
Why not? It seems obvious to me that a UN committee will be under a lot of political pressure to bend the truth, where it is in conflict with politics. And I have seen many, many examples of committees bending the truth. Why is this one different?
I remember when we progressives used to be against the 3 letter agencies and authority in general. Remember the 90's? That's what classical liberals did.
Current progressive movement is completely unhinged and looking more like CCP, sorry to say. It is going to backfire massively.
Of course it will backfire. Progressives these days have no real values aside from extracting as much money as possible from governments and citizens without providing any value in return. Once this strategy stops working, they will turn on each other. Their loyalty to each other is fake, just like everything else in their lives.
Everything they say and do is founded on lies; that's why they depend so much on each other for support and reinforcement. It's a religion. The only way they can maintain their nonsensical ideologies is through repeated, mutual brainwashing.
If you can get those five countries to agree on anything, the lobbyists/politicians running those countries have found some way to benefit from that message.
Like voting changes much. Countries are all basically oligarchies, some of them have extra steps (a sprinkle of democracy, a pound of corruption) so people won't look up from their iPhone and feel superior to those backwards goat farmers with a dictator and no potable water.
Still, I'm glad to see you enjoy seeing your 1/xxxM representation.
I think anyone who's spent time on HN can attest that both are clearly true. HN is absolutely no better than the platforms it loves to decry (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, etc.) in terms of user behavior.
You're just yea-saying. Who defines public good? You and Twitter whoever they are behind the scenes? Clearly there are matters of which we should know nothing. And folk like you will protect us.
If we stay within scope of the action taken here we can clearly see that this is Twitter enforcing some truth in its advertising. Now if it would just ban crypto ads … but I’m not head of advertising at Twitter so it won’t happen.
Also this is the actions of a company. Not a government. A company seeking to limit who or what to advertise. That’s gotta tick a few right of center (politically) boxes no?
This is an absolutely absurd thing to say and is about half a degree away from reductio ad Hitlerum. We’re talking about misleading advertisements here, try to stay grounded when you think about these things.
You folks seem to love the slippery slope argument. There’s clearly a difference between facts and fiction. Not allowing clearly and proven false advertising on the platform elevates that advertising and makes it even more valuable. At least to me. And makes me want to use the platform even more thereby increasing engagement and then driving up ad value and prices.
Advertising honesty != a forced famine nor is it forcing Russian Americans into camps like we did to Japanese citizen in WW2.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1189634360472829952?ref_src=...
In practice, this leads to weird scenarios where Exxon can run promotional ads but climate groups can't run ads in opposition.
I'm not saying this is the wrong policy necessarily, just that "politics" is a tricky thing to define. Labor unions can't run ads saying workers should demand more pay, but Amazon can run ads saying their jobs pay good wages.
Edit: Also, I tried to find the original post but the blog is down, at least for the moment for me. https://blog.twitter.com -- anyway, here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ADXc6W...