The anti-Vaxer threads were flagged and are dead, presumably because someone considered them dangerous.
I fear that doing so mostly just emboldens them and helps their cause. Censoring like that makes me, and probably others, suspicious.
The better thing to do would just be to help them understand the statistics and provide links + explanations for how they are misinterpreting the data.
Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious.
Additionally, disproving some bullshit claim takes a lot of effort - while coming up with further claims is rather easy. It's a very, very uneven battle and one not worth starting. Furthermore, some of the antivax are genuinely misinformed and (to some degree) expressing rational doubts, but there are also a lot of trolls who just enjoy wasting your efforts. They have a lot of time on their hands, and there will always be more trolls tomorrow. Don't bother.
I would consider discussing statistics from a study to be pretty relevant for this site, especially since you can just ignore or collapse a thread if you don’t want to participate.
I’m not even saying I’m suspicious of anything related to vaccine efficacy. I’m saying that it doesn’t look good to shut down people completely like that and that it would be better for society if we tried to correct misinfo instead of censoring people.
Again: the goals you're referring to here aren't those of Hacker News. There's a whole wide Internet to prosecute these kinds of arguments on; I hear Twitter is newly receptive to them. Here, our concerns about how most compellingly to correct misinformation must give way to the prime directive, which is curious conversation.
Most HN threads are tedious and just rehashes of the same opinions people in the SWE world have had for the past decades. If we truly flagged tedious stuff regardless of personal preference you'd see far fewer posts and comments on this website
I flag tedious technical arguments all the time; best case in point: language war comments on threads about Go or Rust. I'm just responding to the parent comment, which suggests we have a duty to entertain stupid arguments to better society. No, we don't!
Certainly, a thoughtful comment expressing skepticism about a study has a home here; for example:
But there are a lot of curious things about vaccines, and plenty of those curious things are reasons why somebody might not be excited at the prospect of getting one.
I for one find constant links about the benefits without any freedom to actually discuss the trade offs incredibly tedious.
I’m a scientific individual, but I don’t appreciate getting nagged.
Edited to add:
I find the repetition of silly debates tedious, too. Like open source licenses, android, iOS, etc. But that doesn’t mean I don’t learn things from some of those debates.
Also, I want to know all the information and know that I know it. I currently know that attitudes like yours are keeping me from learning all there is to know about various vacccines. Because any information that could be interpreted negatively is verboten.
Edited to add one more thing: I was speaking about interesting scientific articles that reveal and discuss the downsides. You implied that I was talking about arguments under those articles being interesting. You do see the difference between those things, right? Banning information because some people react badly to that information is what I’m objecting to.
You’re going to treat it as a joke that during an emergency people like yourself were authoritarians who silenced public debate — leading us to enacting QALY negative public health measures, killing hundreds of thousands.
You do that because you can’t admit what that reality implies about who you are — so you’ll cling to your pretense. Like a Chinese citizen saying it’s “tedious” to discuss the plight of Uyghurs. And you’ll walk away high on your own feigned moral virtue.
That’s the banality of evil — as you’ve so wonderfully demonstrated.
I fear that doing so mostly just emboldens them and helps their cause. Censoring like that makes me, and probably others, suspicious.
The better thing to do would just be to help them understand the statistics and provide links + explanations for how they are misinterpreting the data.