Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
There's a substantive discussion to be had about a tradeoff between individual control, institutional biases, and echo chambers, but setting the thread on fire is not the way to have it.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before:
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit here more to heart? We want curious conversation across differences, not name-calling and enemy-bashing.
You're saying it like people choosing how to consume the information by themselves - rather than the choice being made by their betters somewhere deep inside the corporate guts of Google, Facebook, etc. - is a bad thing. It's nothing of the sort. And yes, if people are free to choose who to trust, somebody would make a mistake and trust wrong people. That's inevitable consequence of freedom. The only alternative is to have a choice taken away and everybody rely on the choices that somebody made for them.
> But it's cool because it will be a "conscious" choice
Exactly. You probably meant it to be sarcastic, but it's actually true.
I think it can't be solved by a search engine. If you search for conspiracy junk that's what will be surfaced. Attempts to correct for this will just introduce other biases until the search engine maker likes what they see. Introducing contrary content into search results will annoy users, and also surface fringe junk more frequently.
A search engine is bias. If you wanted unbiased results, you would sort the results randomly. Maybe even return random URLs without regard for what was in the search query.
It's a personal responsibility of each person to deal with their confirmation bias. You can't outsource it to a bunch of underpaid overworked subcontractors, even if they are called "fact checkers" or "moderation team" by their employers at Facebook or Google. The way to reduce the consequences of bad thinking patterns is not to censor more and force-feed people the "approved truth". It's to educate more and to earn people's trust by telling them the truth. It's not easy and it's not a guarantee of success. But it's the only way that can actually improve anything, as opposed to just creating more and more people that can't even talk to each other.
The purpose of a search engine is to help people find what they're searching for, full stop. We can't go around transforming every class of tool into some kind of galaxy-brained universal-utility-maximizer. Things, meaning not-people, should just do what they're expected to do. Calculators help child traffickers compute the profits they make from their victims, as they should. Search engines should find what you ask them to find. Or at least, there should be something in existence that we could call a "search engine" which just does that one thing and does it well. I don't expect Google to change or anything, they can do what they want. But it's absolutely not wrong to have something that just accomplishes the task of finding a thing you want to find on the Internet, any more than its wrong to have a thing that just compiles code--any code--to an efficient list of CPU instructions.
A tool that has one primary purpose but also does no evil is an insanely complex, corruptible, expensive, and ineffective tool.
I don't think this is how we reach people. The antivax people I know aren't won over by seeing a public health official on TV or in the news. The person most likely to reach them is their physician -- but only if they are a strong personality.
On the plus side, it may mean less vitriol in the comments section.
People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
So they get called terms that squash conversation and have a purpose to see them shunned.
You see, any disagreement with any official government policy or statement - even if it changed the next day - is going to get you the "anti-" label. As witnessed right here in the comments. The term is not supposed to be helpful, it is supposed to be used as a bludgeon, do dismiss people instead of considering their arguments on merits.
>ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
This is a common conspiracy red herring because anti-vaxxers by definition have already made a choice to be anti-vaccine.
Very few people are still genuinely debating the merits of vaccines (or the covid vaccine), and those who choose against vaccines try to nobilize their opinion as being some unsung investigators.
UFO enthusiasts, big foot hunters, and other conspiricists shine themselves in the same light.
- 40-year old with no health conditions. Suspects of having contracted Covid back in February of 2020 (symptoms were high-fever, a really bad sore throat, anosmia) but due to lack of tests at the time could not confirm it.
- Inclined to oppose vaccine mandates. Doesn't believe that any vaccine in particular is "dangerous", but that mass-vaccination brings systemic risks. (Black swans)
- Got the vaccine anyway as soon as they were available in Spring 2021. Got the booster in end of 2021.
- Has two kids of school age, all of them received the commonly scheduled vaccines for "traditional" diseases.
- Opposes vaccination of healthy children for Covid. Prefers the policy of frequent testing instead.
- Supports the eventual decision to have scheduled Covid vaccinations like the flu: for older people and those with health conditions, or anyone recommended by a doctor.
- Despite triple-shot, got infected (this time confirmed by rapid tests and a PCR) in February 2022. Symptoms were again high-fever and a bad throat. No anosmia. Kids also got infected, only one of them with symptoms of fever for one day and two days of coughing.
- Not planning to get the fourth booster, unless required for practical reasons.
So... What's your verdict? Anti-vaxxer? Conspiracy theorist?
You think of vaccines purely in terms of their impact on the injected individual. You don’t seem to generally consider the value of population level vaccination rates in preventing the spread or impact of diseases on people other than you or your family members.
It’s a reasonable position, and I’m casting no moral judgement on you for it.
But, consider: Polio is a disease which is like the flu for the vast majority of cases. Child mortality rates are less than 5% of the 0.5% of cases who develop a central nervous system infection. Given those numbers, why should we vaccinate healthy kids against polio? The answer is not because vaccinating everyone ensures we prevent those cases from developing - it’s because vaccinating everyone wipes the disease out.
That same individualist perspective probably inclines you to think that other people’s vaccination decisions don’t have much impact on you, so you don’t particularly care if other people are antivax.
I would just encourage you to consider that vaccination is not entirely an individual choice and that the existence of a vocal antivax community reduces the value to our collective health that your family’s participation in regular vaccine schedules is supposed to buy. Your kids took the risk of those vaccines to help us maintain a herd immunity to measles, mumps, rubella and polio - but antivaxers who don’t participate in those programs and discourage such participation make that immunity more fragile.
The polio vaccine does not require frequent boosters. It is a different risk profile for a one-time shot vs a frequent injection. Risks compound, the benefits don't.
The polio vaccine is administered only in a segment of the population. If there is risk of, e.g, a "bad batch" of vaccines that could be fatal, we would be potentially causing harm to kids of a very-specific age. If we are talking about mass-vaccination every six months for everyone, the risk of a "bad batch" would lead to potentially everyone being harmed.
The polio vaccine has been administered for decades already. Its safety is not just measured by a bunch of lab tests. Its safety is proven in the field.
Polio is a disease that is somewhat stable. Covid started with high fatality rates (as it usually happens with any new virus entering a population) but will tend to become endemic and mutate to be less harmful, like other seasonal respiratory diseases. Again, I totally supported and encouraged high vaccination rates when its risks were unknown, but now we have more information and I don't see why we should treat it any differently than what we do with the flu.
Nobilizing your opinion on morality doesn't justify your lack of understanding of vaccine mandates. This is exactly the counterpoint I made to OP that you're doing now.
But I suspect you know that, which is why you're not addressing my comment.
I don't get it. If you knew you were going to get so upset about and be averse to discussing the answer on your anti-vaxx opinion, why did you even ask about it?
I am not upset at all. I am just demonstrating the point of OP: no matter how many points in common I can have with you, you are still calling me anti-vaxx, i.e, you are more focused in using a "term that squash conversation and have a purpose to see them shunned" than in finding ways to resolve differences with harmony.
IOW, you destroy all chance of a nuanced conversation and you will not accept anything except total submission to your line of thinking. This is the pure essence of Fascism.
There is no nuanced conversation when one participant asks a question and then vaguely hand-waves other comments while refusing to address the answer on how they're wrong about R0 goals with viral mandates.
This bad-faith pattern of behavior here is more to my original point about antivaxxers seeking to nobilize their own opinion as a matter of their identity, rather than being genuinely interested in discussing or investigating facts.
If you couldn't find the sibling comment and needed me to copy-paste the comment, you could've just said so...
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Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justifiable to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea that people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
The sibling comment (the one that I originally responded) stated that "I don't understand vaccines because individual effects are not as potent without the herd effects" and that "if you oppose mandates, you don't understand vaccines and you are anti-vax"
Your "argument" (or whatever passed for one) was "you lack a critical understanding of how vaccines work, so you are inclined (sic?) to be anti-vaxx"
The issue of both the sibling comment and your own is that they assume that any two people with the same information can only reach the same "logical" conclusion. My response was an attempt to show that this is not true.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the concept of herd immunization, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do the same and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the importance of keeping R0 low, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do anything possible to reduce spread and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It's not because someone is against vaccine mandates, that the person is anti-vax.
Does it help if I lay everything out like this, or would you need me to pre-chew it a bit for you?
If you "oppose vaccine mandates" you don't understand how vaccines work and are antivax, full stop. Their individual effects are far less potent without the herd effects.
And here we go - now "anti-vax" also means "opposed to the government using force to make every single person to take certain medication". That's as stupid as saying somebody is "pro-murder" because they oppose the idea of people spending all their lives under house arrest - under the theory that this would reduce the number of murders. Since you oppose the action that reduces the number of murders - you are clearly "pro-murder"!
You retained your bodily rights with the covid vaccine because nobody forced you to take it - full stop. You forfeited certain public privileges by opting out of the vaccine because you made yourself a lethal threat (a literal plague rat) to others. Next you'll be saying that driving drunk is your bodily right too.
Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish. Intentional motivation or not, the actions of rejecting the covid vaccine for non-medical reasons is definitely pro-plague.
It's makes as much sense as saying when the mugger on the street says
"your wallet or your life", it's just a proposal for a voluntary transaction - after all, if you give up your wallet, no harm will come to you, and it's certainly entirely in your free choice to choose just that. And if you make yourself a threat to him by refusing to give him so needed cash - well, it's on you mate.
> Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish
I think your reading comprehension is lacking. Please try to read on the concept of "analogy". I gave you one more above as an exercise. To make it easier for you, I will reveal now that I did not actually claim people are getting robbed when vaccinated, and people are not actually getting shot when they refuse to get vaccinated. The point of the "analogy" thing is to emphasize a certain structure of the situation by imagining some other situation - "other" is the key word here, meaning the situation is not the same - which shares some structural element with the situation being illustrated. In this case, something being a "free choice" seemingly, but due to very grave consequences attached to one of the choices, not being choice at all but rather an exercise in coercion - which in both cases btw nobody is really intending to hide, the coercive element is there precisely because only one result is considered acceptable by the coercing power. Hope this helps you with understanding the concept behind the "analogy" device.
> you don't understand how vaccines work and are antivax, full stop.
To quote the GGP: People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
Your comment: Q.E.D.
> Their individual effects are far less potent without the herd effects.
Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justified to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
By which definition? There are a lot of people that doubt effectiveness or risk-reward benefits of some vaccines, and choose not to take them by themselves for one reason or another. There are much less people that oppose any medication called "vaccine" on general principle, just because it is called so. Conflating all variety of people's opinions about all variety of medications called "vaccines" into a binary "for-against" choice and establishing a tribal barrier that discards everybody with a wrong value of the bit as "conspiracy" is a useless exercise for anything except making yourself feel better because you have the right bit value, not like those idiots.
And of course, for each new vaccine, its merits must be debated, and its risk-reward profile (no medication is ever without risks) needs to be discussed on merits. Saying it can not and should not happen only paints you as a quasi-religious zealot who would refuse to even look at facts and consider them - that's not how science is or should be done.
The semantics of anti-vaxx here almost exclusively to people who opted out of covid vaccines/mandates for non-medical reasons, or people who still follow Jenny McCarthy's view on standard vaccinations for which risk/reward profiles have already been established.
Nope, we just witnessed using "anti-vax" label for people that oppose mandatory vaccinations, even if they themselves are vaccinated up to the tip of their head. This term is a bludgeon designed to mark somebody as "doubleplusungood" and thus summarily dismiss anything this person is saying. Very useful if you don't want to bother to discuss some things and support your opinion, and still want to look like you won the discussion and have the moral high-ground. Not very useful if you want to understand things or convince people.
You sound very sure of your opinions on all of this. Your life must be bliss, being right and righteous about everything all of the time. You could use the Goggles to cement your current world view - what an excellent feature for you. /s
Such a reductionist opinion on HN not flagged already. Unfortunately, reality doesn't pick sides on the reason why someone chooses some tool. It may be due to right-wingism, sure. But it may also be caused by, focusing on brave, feeling sick by being fed low-quality SEO sites, quora articles (or even clones tbereof) and more.
And in my opinion, your apparent cure (censoring and filtering) makes things worse, at least from my POV the divide between reason and extremism got way worse since we're trying to "correct" opinions by censoring stuff.
I would love to see a web browser offering user controllable filtering, reranking and reader mode working over search, social sites and news feeds. A "web sanitiser".
