Hacker News Reader

Comment by seper8 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the schizophrenic uncle is telling us the earth is not at the centre of the universe, should we censor him?

Humanity has proven to be so wrong about so many things before, best let the discussion flow instead of trying to kill competing theories...

View on HN

I am pretty confident that the appropriate place to distribute revolutionary new scientific models based in factual evidence isn't the joe rogan experience.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better one.

Research shouldn’t be locked up behind paywalls and in ivory towers. It should be public knowledge and lots of basic questions should be asked about it.

Sure. And a growing portion of research is made available through places like arxiv. The government is also pushing new regulations to make research publicly available when funded by the government, which is a dominant force in grant funding. This is wildly different than presenting findings on JRE.

And, in general, revolutionary new scientific ideas are targeted at scientists rather than the lay public. Ideas like new models of the solar system don't tend to take hold because the public thinks they are cool but instead because they become inevitable within the scientific community. Being less able to go on JRE and talk about how awesome ivermectin to a massive listener base is isn't going to limit scientific breakthroughs in the future.

I didn’t suggest killing competing theories. Only pointing out that this analogy is missing some fairly important characteristics. You know, the ones people are actually worried about.

If "out of my butt" is the best support you have for your "theory", then it's not really a theory is it?

Any of us could write an app that generated "theories" ... a few may even turn out to be correct or close.

This is a straw man. There is a spectrum of choices between having Alex Jones on multiple times and treating him seriously and censoring him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com