— Science, Reason, Criteriology — 2 min read
The Wall Street Journal commented on Youtube's censorship. So I responded. Here is my quick take as not seen on WSJ.
Let’s call him Billy. Standing about a foot taller, he scared me fierce.
Four years older, he would make it a point to push me around at school. Reasons? He wanted some lunch; my hair was too short; I was breathing.
He threw weight around because he could. He would dictate the conversation, its tone, the outcome. Any effort to engage (“My mom made that for me”) was a mug’s game. Will over intellect. Simple.
Once you grasp Billy, then the pieces nearly all fall into place, and Youtube's "reasons" are made plain. cf Youtube’s Political Censorship, WSJ Editorial, September 15, 2020
Were it only Dr. Scott Atlas’ three-second rhetorical emphasis, barely an ever-so-faint infraction of W.H.O. guidelines, reasonable minds would have let the Hoover Institution’s interview remain.
(The video can, as of this writing, be found here via a FB link and is part of the Uncommon Knowledge interviews hosted by Peter Robinson where the audio can still be found.)
Were "science" the guide, one could even engage the censors at Youtube to re-exam ironclad adherence to W.H.O., consider the reliability of other opinions, and understand the immense difficulty of judging clinical observations over brief time spans during a rapidly-moving pandemic.
But, as Saturday Night Live’s Medieval Doctor, Theodoric of York, would say, “Naaaaaw.”
Like a worse version of H.A.L., the better angels of the net will choose when a question, in dispute but a moment ago, has come to resolution. If change be needed, they’ll let us know by deleting content, banning participants, channeling search queries – accelerating it all in an election cycle with a single-minded commitment to being “passionate.”
The fool says in his heart this is about the scientific method.
Nope. This is a tiresome and tawdry tech-savvy Billy all grow’d up.
Note: Since I wrote this I did receive some feedback. I chose not to rewrite it. My reason: I do not consider science and its required methods matters of policy debate. The very problem isn't that Youtube or anyone else is right or wrong; the problem is that the method by which we get to what is true is a circuitous one, and heavy-handed attempts to block the path is often, in the long or the short run, detrimental to science.
The easy objection is that online publishers need to suppress outrageous material. I agree. But in the medical realm, most all of us, certainly those in the screening unit of Google, must rely on experts to determine what is beyond the bounds. Choosing one source and finding no give necesarily discounts the legitimacy of other sources of authority, here a respected medical doctor.
I do not know who is right. I just know I wouldn't bet on one pony.