The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.

I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.

Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc

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dazilcher 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.

Whether they did or not is almost irrelevant: information doesn't reach humans instantaneously, it takes time to propagate through channels with varying latency, it gets amplified/muted depending on media bias, people generally have things going on in life other than staying glued to new sources, etc.

If you take a cross sample you're guaranteed to observe contradictory "parallel" information even if the source is serially consistent.

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zmgsabst 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You’re removing people who were correct before the WHO revised their position.

	▲	margalabargala 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is the problem I discuss in my third paragraph, yes.

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brailsafe 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The difference between a contradiction and a revision is the difference between parallel and serial.

Eh, ya kind of, but it seems more like the distinction between parallel and concurrent in this case. She doesn't appear to be wrong in that instance while at the same time the models might have indicated otherwise, being an apparent contradiction and apparently both true within the real scope of what could be said about it at that time.

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naasking 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A censorship policy that changes daily is a shitty policy. If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?

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xracy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's a nice hypothetical. Do you have any examples of people getting censored for WHO changing their stance?

Like, we're getting pretty nuanced here pretty fast, it would be nice to discuss this against an actual example of how this was enforced rather than being upset about a hypothetical situation where we have no idea how it was enforced.

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margalabargala 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A censorship policy that changes daily is a shitty policy.

Yes.

> If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?

Obviously not. Like I pointed out to the other commenter, if you were to read the comment of mine you replied to, I have a whole paragraph discussing that. Not sure why you're asking again.

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gjsman-1000 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Screw that; and HN needs a place to frame the most incredible takes so we never forget.

	▲	margalabargala 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The person I replied to edited their comment after I replied making it look like I was saying the opposite of what I was. Is that what you were referring to?

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IIAOPSW 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's only two ways one could have been contradicting information from the WHO which was later revised prior to them revising it. Either:

1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.

2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.

I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.

A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.

So in response.

It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.

People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.

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natch 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They would not utter the word Taiwan. That’s an huge red flag that they are captured and corrupt. Are you claiming this has changed?

	▲	margalabargala 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Did you reply to the wrong comment? We're discussing whether the WHO put out simultaneously contradictory information. Whether the WHO's politics matches your preferred politics for southeast Asia doesn't seem topical?