I tried to make a post with the https://species.wikimedia.org/ link, and I get "Your content couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards".
Being generous, it could be there's NSFW imagery in there? I can't be arsed to dig into a mountain of scientifically named links, but you can find troves of pr0n among other things in Wikimedia if you know where to look.
(I'm not sure why my comment is now collapsed by default. It doesn't seem to be flagged, and has a score of 15.)
I tried again, and this time I get "Posts that look like spam are blocked", and a similar message if I try to leave a link in a comment.
I wonder if spammers have been vandalizing Wikispecies and posting the links, but unlike Wikipedia the editors of Wikispecies struggle to remove the spam in time? The project has hundreds of thousands of pages, but the vast majority would have very little content or oversight. It could be the Wiki project with the worst pages-per-editor ratio.
I guess if they blocked *.wikimedia.org to get at commons.wikimedia.org that could make sense. However all those images are also accessible via an en.wikipedia.org url.
Thank you for actually spelling porn. This whole thing around altering spelling to avoid blocking which I presume comes out of other apps has gotten to be quite annoying.
It absolutely came from censorship. IRC chat rooms and PHPBB message boards with blacklists of words that would get starred out. Hoping it wasn't implemented with substring match so typing "shell" didn't come out "s****".
Meta barely changed their moderation policy. The community standard docs which list every violation are still extremely long and cover a large swath of speech https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/, to which they only added 2 bullet point exceptions (and eventually the future addition of community notes)
> speech standards should be determined by public opinion and not by reason, evidence and a scientific mindset.
Yes this is largely a debate between a top-down technocratic worldview vs democratic/meritocratic one. The point is FB is still very much on the former highly centralized expert-defined guideline/automated system side while only making small moves in the other direction with community notes. Maybe they'll keep going in that direction but what they say vs do is an important distinction.
How are you evaluating this? Are you including the truth of the Facebook post, whether moderators correctly/accurately act upon the flagging, whether users choose to stick on the platform after seeing the content, whether users stop believing in any objective truth, or something else?
Community notes only does fact-checking, but moderation has the ability to reduce the activity of bad actors. They serve 2 different purposes from where I stand.
To be clear, the people who believe speech standards should be determined by public opinion are as incorrect as, say, flat earthers.
I don't have a huge problem with community notes per se. I do have a huge problem with blatantly unequal standards just because large parts of the public have morally rotten views.
Centralized and diffused power are each vulnerable in their own ways -- diffused power to cults in particular. You'd generally expect people with more training to make better decisions than people with less training.
Regardless, morality in general is quite objective. In particular, it is objectively the case that letting some groups of people be called mentally ill while other similarly situated groups not is bad.
Meh. The only thing that matters is whether they're reflecting objective reality (including objective moral reality). There's no a priori reason to believe that each political tendency is equally attached to reality.
I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality. When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias.
> I think they implied that this bias also ran counter to objective reality.
But did it actually?
> When someone calls out something that is objectively false, it's not usually considered bias.
I wish what you were saying were true. In reality, motivated actors will call anything that shows them wrong biased.
The whole point of having a scientific mindset is to try and ascertain what's true by building the best models one can. This often means a lot of inherent complexity, since the world is quite complex (map-territory relation). But humans prefer simpler models over more complex ones, which leads to bad outcomes.
> Centralized and diffused power are each vulnerable in their own ways.
Of course that's true. But one of them is worse.
> You'd generally expect people with more training to make better decisions than people with less training.
When it comes to politics, morality, and judgement, we cannot defer to an expert class. It's everyone's responsibility to be "trained" and make good decisions.
> There's no a priori reason to believe that each political tendency is equally attached to reality.
That's certainly true. For instance, post-modernism, the foundational religion of the far left, rejects truth, objectivity, and the scientific method: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3463968/
I 100% believe that one side is far less grounded in reality than the other. I still would prefer a diffused speech enforcement system to one that allowed a few "experts" to elevate my opinion and suppress the opinion of those I disagree with.
Postmodernism is not the foundational religion of the far left, whatever that means. To the extent that any philosophy is that, it is Marxism, a kind of modernism. Postmodernism is explicitly and inherently anti-Marxist.
I think postmodernism and post-structuralism have useful things to say around map-territory relationships, but the extreme "there is no objective reality" form of postmodernism is plainly false. And I share your concern about public perception of GMOs being wrong.
I'd recommend checking out Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard. There are deep insights there about how society has replaced ground-level (i.e. objective) truths with symbols and signs, and there's a lot of discussion about map-territory relationships in there. You might enjoy it!
> To the extent that any philosophy is that, it is Marxism
I actually don't think that's the case at all. Post-modernism is far more prevalent today than Marxism and even more dangerous.
> Postmodernism is explicitly and inherently anti-Marxist.
Some post-modernists may claim that, but I don't think it's true in practice or even in theory. If anything, post-modernism is, in some ways or facets, an evolution of Marxism beyond economics: https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/postmodernism_does_it_have...
Would strongly recommend checking out Baudrillard's ideas.
I am the complete opposite of a relativist when it comes to the territory, but clearly the maps we make of that territory are influenced by social and cultural history. So they are worth questioning or "deconstructing".
The main way the right is unmoored from reality is in saying that the maps that have traditionally existed are the territory, or at least are indistinguishable from it. That is plainly incorrect, for the simple reason that a faithful model of reality must be as complicated as reality itself. And if you insist that your simplistic view is the right one, the inevitable result is that you'll violently reshape the territory to fit the map (which is what the current regime has been doing).
Thanks for the info. Can you give an example of someone on the right mistaking a symbol for reality? I've seen, I believe, the opposite in play. I've seen, for instance, thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau argue the exact opposite; that a symbol is an approximation but also that it's utility is tied to fidelity with reality. And, over-simplistic viewpoints are found in abundance on the left.
As an example, a leftist over-simplifies that all group disparities must be caused by systemic injustice. This is deeply untrue, and, for instance, Sowell's "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" is a treatise on the myriad of complexities that can result in group disparity that have nothing to do with social oppression or even occur in spite of it. But the SJW has a "map" of the territory, and it gives a seemingly univariate explanation for everything.
> Can you give an example of someone on the right mistaking a symbol for reality?
Gender. The observed behavior among humans is clearly very complex, but the right keeps insisting that its binary/immutable map is the territory. This leads to recent moves like the administration saying that trans people are inherently dishonest and saying false things -- which is a claim about objective reality, and specifically that the simplistic map they have is reality.
Note, I am not saying that gender is just a social construct. It isn't, there are clearly deep affinities and anti-affinities related to gender built into our brain wiring. But it's not as simple as the right makes it out to be either.
> As an example, a leftist over-simplifies that all group disparities must be caused by systemic injustice.
As someone on the left I don't believe this at all. I think systemic injustice explains a large part of disparities but not all of them. I'm not a fan of univariate or monocausal explanations in general.
> I think systemic injustice explains a large part of disparities but not all of them.
I appreciate your statement of nuance, However, most letists behave as if systemic injustice is the primary cause, and the only cause worth dealing with, regardless of whether evidence or research suggest otherwise. In fact, they are actively hostile to even attempting to find and compare other causes. And thinkers like Kendi outright say that all disparity is evidence of discrimination: https://dailycampus.com/2020/09/21/no-disparity-does-not-imp...
> Gender. The observed behavior among humans is clearly very complex, but the right keeps insisting that its binary/immutable map is the territory.
I have no problem believing a person can invent a definition of gender with complex meaning. Most conservatives, however, simply reject these formulations as a mixture of false, societally destructive, and causing far more harm than good. Before the 20th century gender was a word related to grammar only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
From Wikipedia: "The concept of gender, in the modern social science sense, is a recent invention in human history.[26] The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.[26] The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s."
And, as we all know, Money proved a very evil human and poor scientist, as his seminal research was entirely and thoroughly debunked.
Conservatives argue that the best definition for gender is a synonym for biological sex, which for humans has two functional categories. I have yet to see an iota of real proof that a more complex definition is truer or better.
> I have no problem believing a person can invent a definition of gender which complex meaning.
No! I am not a relativist. Observed behavior is what it is, and a scientific mindset means creating the best possible models for it. Some models are objectively better than others.
(At a meta level, I also believe that the naturalistic/scientific way of looking at the world is objectively better than other ways. At an even more meta level, I believe what I believe because, modulo uncertainty, it is the objectively best set of beliefs; if I believed otherwise, I'd change my beliefs in that direction.)
> Most conservatives, however, simply reject these formulations as a mixture of false, societally destructive, and causing far more harm than good.
Exactly. Conservatives believe their simplistic map is the territory.
> Before the 20th century gender was not used to meaning anything beyond male/female.
Not the terms maybe. But there is existence beyond signs and signifiers, which is exactly what Baudrillard and others have said.
> It was John Money and colleagues who likely lead the way with its redefinition, and, as we all know, Money proved to be a twisted, despicable human being. His seminal research was also proven profoundly and completely false, making him an extremely poor scientist as well.
I care about reality, not some scientist being a fuckup. There are plenty of scientists who describe reality better than conservatives do and also have unimpeachable integrity.
> Conservatives argue that the best definition for gender is a synonym for biological sex, which for humans has two functional possibilities. I have yet to see an iota of real proof that something else is better.
Well, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. You have the simplistic belief that your binary/immutable map of an observably complex territory is the territory.
Reality is quite complex, so more complex models are in general going to describe reality better. That alone should make people be suspicious of simpler models when more complex models have greater explanatory power. (Occam's razor only applies when multiple explanations describe the world with equal predictive power. As a first cut, a maxim of going against Occam's razor will generally lead to better results.)
I edited my message while you were responding, and I think the edits make it more clear that the reinvention of gender was done by people with no scientific proof of what they were doing. They were instead acting as philosophers and theologians of their own atheist religion, which is also incidentally what post modernists tend to do. You speak about reality and yet all I see are a bunch of people denying reality as they try to reshape words to describe the fantasy in their heads.
Lastly, claiming that, if a model is more complex, therefore it is more true, is a logical fallacy. I hope you can see at least that. You've given zero backing to your assertions other than "your model is too simple." It's not enough to say that. You have to show that another model is more true or better in some way.
We've seen the fruits of gender theory: decline, suffering, and destruction. China won't let any of that on their Tik Tok equivalent, as we've learned recently, and we all know why. Its untrue, and it acts as deadly poison to civilization. The tension between conservatism and progressivism is to allow good new ideas to thrive but to reject the bad ones. It's becoming more and more clear that gender theory is the latter, and it should hopefully soon be left to the ash heap of history.
I am an actual trans person, you know. Unlike religion or higher powers, there is a great body of evidence that a model of gender which treats people like me as honest conveyors of our experiences is a much better description of reality than a model like yours.
The difference is that scientific models of gender are naturalistic (they follow typical scientific principles), and religious models are not. I think the naturalistic view of the world is objectively the best view of the world.
I believe that truth and true religion are one and the same. The founder of my church said:
"The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.”
I would like this to be my last response. I don't want to endlessly debate or make you feel like you need to endlessly respond. If you would like to respond with some links to the evidence that supports a complex model of gender as being more in line with reality, I'd be happy to take a look (without responding, of course, with my opinion on that evidence).
I'm glad you place a high value on the truth. I do as well, though I come at it from a proudly irreligious standpoint.
There is a vast amount of evidence about things like medical transition improving mental and physical health in trans people [1], as well as cisgender people experiencing gender dysphoria when they are misgendered (many cis men react quite badly if you call them a girl or a woman!) It all aligns far closer to the modern scientific view of gender than a traditional religious view.
But I would just like you to consider two things:
One, that I personally have gotten objectively measurable benefits from transitioning. You are welcome to check out my body of professional work and writing. Is there any point at which any of it suggests I am deluded about anything? I am generally quite a rigorous person, and my work is valued for its careful attention to detail. It would be quite strange if this is the one thing I was deluded about—that's not how such illnesses manifest.
So I am an honest conveyor of my experiences. But I'm not special! It would be quite strange if I were the only one.
Two, that the people who came up with the traditional view of gender were functionally illiterate. They didn't even have germ theory back then, let alone statistical modeling and Bayes' theorem! Basically everything we know from before the advent of modern science is subject to rigorous questioning, and is often plain wrong. Of course the modern scientific view of gender is a much better fit to reality—it is informed by studying actual lives through sophisticated means! Modern ways of knowing are better than pre-modern ones. That should be your prior.
Speech standards have never been set by "reason, evidence and a scientific mindset". The people who are complaining now that the shoe is on the other foot were quite happy when it was their side setting the rules.
Objective standards would be best, but subjective standards that you pretend are objective are far worse than subjective standards that are honest about it.
I didn't go down the list, but I'll just note that you're not claiming any of the articles contain factually incorrect information. "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no.
Thank you for the link to PBS. The article makes it clear that the government didn't actually order anything, and that Meta was free to agree or disagree. It also is worth noting that Zuckerberg himself is a motivated actor, who might be presenting a spin on facts favorable to his audience.
> "trying to achieve", "far-right website", pretending "basic standard of human decency" have anything to do with an editorial policy I doubt you could quote. Just no.
Well obviously the most heinous bits aren't publicly available. But I do know how that site routinely treats people like myself.
edit: this bit is quite funny:
> “I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other” despite analyses showing otherwise, he said. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another – or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.”
And yet he made a tremendous in-kind contribution by selectively relaxing speech standards, in a way that clearly favors one political tendency.
> “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”
That doesn't quite mesh with "reason, evidence and a scientific mindset". Finding fault with additional claims doesn't change that.
I find the changes Meta made, and the explicit examples they gave which groups to bash, abhorrent. But I also remember how the mainstream enforced all sorts of unhelpful things, so there was basically two big groups, Covid deniers running wild, and the people who didn't allow any criticism or questioning, who were using the outright Covid deniers as an excuse for that. While making ads about being asked by future generations to retell the story how they saved the world by staying at home. The arrogance and mindlessness was so thick you could cut it. It was all "you're with us or with the terrorists". That happened, trying to pretend it didn't would set us on the path of repeating stuff like that. Therefore, just no.
> That doesn't quite mesh with "reason, evidence and a scientific mindset". Finding fault with additional claims doesn't change that.
I agree. Honestly I think it was a real mistake for the WH to pressure Meta. Avoiding even the appearance of impropriety is important.
But again, note how very little the current regime cares about the appearance of impropriety. The fact that Zuckerberg hasn't said a single thing about that is quite telling!
A lot of biases tend to be reflected in what people don't say, not what people do say. It is harder to hold people to account for omissions.
> there was basically two big groups, Covid deniers running wild, and the people who didn't allow any criticism or questioning, who were using the outright Covid deniers as an excuse for that. While making ads about being asked by future generations to retell the story how they saved the world by staying at home. The arrogance and mindlessness was so thick you could cut it. It was all "you're with us or with the terrorists".
The polarization on the issue was really bad, I agree. I was hoping that Operation Warp Speed would be a depolarizing event, but sadly that was not to be.
> note how very little the current regime cares about the appearance of impropriety
Yes, and I know it wasn't unfair treatment what "forced" them to get this way and do these things. They wanted to do them anyway.
For me it's not even about respecting certain principles so that you can demand them from people who don't like plurality (e.g. current US administration). It's just about the principles, nothing utilitarian. If one had to give up such principles to "win", then there is nothing to win anyway. Though I also think that intellectual honesty and tolerance, freedom and confidence etc. (not lip service to them) are really powerful. Something that can and does make people go "I want that for myself and the people around me".
And I think criticizing "one's own" isn't necessarily weakness, it doesn't have to lead to bickering and division. Just look at how you told someone off, and then I told you off, and now we're having this little conversation. Bad start, but better landing.
Mind you, I think some passion and having fun with the in-group, making some fun of other groups, can be fine. It's what people do when they do something together they believe in and are excited about. But some ironic distance, not unironically believing one's in-group to be "the" good guys, is also needed. And just generally thinking less in groups and labels first, and individuals and their opinions or arguments second, if at all.
Sorry for rambling, but also thanks for hearing me.
I agree. Where I start dooming is in realizing that incorrectness and simplistic modeling is a lot sexier than complexity. The world's now so much more complex than it ever has been, and we just haven't been able to keep up with it.
The problem with facts has been well known to science since at least 2006:
> We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias[1]
That's just dividing the world into "liberal" and "conservative", and both are defined as Americans see them.
But also, let's take it at face value: what does it take to be best buds with "reality" and still lose to people at war with it? A concerted effort of memes, "I'm #1 why try harder" is what I saw. Arrogance, intellectual laziness. "It's fine as long as we're right more often than them" so to speak. But "they" were and never are the standard.
I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of that framing. Public opinion is only loosely correlated with the reduction of suffering.
There is an asymmetry for sure, but plenty of liberals also have incorrect beliefs -- liberal and left-wing NIMBYism comes to mind. It's really important to be evidence-driven and curious, and be willing to add complexity to your models as necessary.
Yes, I agree it's crudely framed and flawed. And other plentiful examples of left wing anti-evidence/expertise movements come from the "alternative medicine" arena. I think the problem with this moment in time is that factual accuracy takes expertise to curate. It's not something democratic processes generate. It's certainly not something you achieve with populism. So we've gone from "alternative facts" to.. "facts are what the majority believes to be true"? Bizarre.
Speech standards should be determined by public opinion, science has never had a seat at the table in the West. If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering.
The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
> science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
Other than science being the entire reason the US were able to corner the fascists in WW2. Let a lone all the scientific break throughs in the last few decades coming from the West. Heck before WWII, the automobile?
1. There was an entire sentence, taking the second part without the first ("Speech standards should be determined by public opinion") removes essential context.
2. The fascists were Westerners (and leaders in science/technology, for that matter, the US didn't beat them with more technology).
I still disagree, science has had a seat at the table in the West especially around speech. Speech was either locked down using control of technologies or speech was empowered using proliferation of technologies.
For the Japanese. The war was shortened. But by the time of the bomb they were doomed. They could not replace their losses like the Americans could
The Germans were beaten mostly by the Soviets. They (the Germans) were overwhelmed. And they too could not replace their losses like the Soviets could. Especially humans
> Speech standards should be determined by public opinion
To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement?
> science has never had a seat at the table in the West.
This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified.
> If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering.
What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications.
> The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence.
True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from.
> The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable.
I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.
