The Stakes Are High, Don’t Shun Contrarians!
I.
One thing Covid-19 taught me is that humans have a norm of liberally tolerating contrarians when the stakes are low and it would take decades to be proven right, but shunning contrarians when stakes are high and events are moving fast.
Seeing as how they ended up in a global crisis anyway, some folks have taken it upon themselves to volunteer with the online coronapolice in order to enforce this norm. Surveilling the Internet, they force anyone who says anything about the virus that deviates from the official consensus to shut it, and command the world to listen only to official bodies such as the WHO.
That you should keep silent about the coronavirus if you didn’t happen to attend the right university lectures twenty years ago seems like an unwritten rule by now. If you, like Elon Musk, share your theories anyway, they will go after you. Delete your Tweet, who do you think you are?!
YouTube even everything not aligning with official WHO advice.
Doesn’t that go a bit far?
II.
It is interesting to consider how censoring alternative views should help. Doesn’t truth-finding benefit from discussion?
The idea behind such an extreme measure, I think, is that we need to be protected from…
