Who decides what counts as misinformation?: The Story. The letter with no evidence

February 19, 2020. Twenty-seven scientists published a Lancet letter declaring lab-origin theories about COVID do nothing but create fear. The letter cited no genomic evidence. Its organizer, Peter Daszak, ran the nonprofit funneling NIH grants to the Wuhan lab the letter was defending. His conflict of interest went undisclosed for fourteen months. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube treated the letter as authoritative. Posts mentioning the lab were labeled, throttled, removed.

By May 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported three Wuhan researchers hospitalized in November 2019. The WHO called for investigation. Facebook quietly updated its policies. The hypothesis migrated from debunked conspiracy to plausible origin without anyone explaining what changed or why the suppression had been wrong.

The alien anthropologist’s question

Describe a fact-check to an alien. An organization funded by the platform whose content it evaluates reviews a claim made by a user with no access to review criteria, no right to confront the reviewer, and no appeal mechanism. The reviewer’s political orientation is undisclosed on the label. The label says false. It does not say evaluated by an organization receiving 80 percent of its revenue from the company that published the claim. Greg Lukianoff has traced the institutional capture that made this architecture feel inevitable.

The people who built the labeling system and still believe it can be repaired are the platform governance camp. Those who watched the Christchurch shooter livestream for seventeen minutes while AI failed to flag it are the state regulators. Wikipedia’s 60 million articles sit behind the open process position. And the people finding John Stuart Mill uncomfortably current are the speech liberalists.

The machine nobody trusts

Fact-check labels change almost nobody’s mind. The suppressed posts find new routes. The apparatus looks less like public protection and more like an expensive machine built to solve a problem it has not demonstrated it understands. Whether the replacement is better platforms, state regulation, community process, or something built on trust-weighted information is the question the lab-leak episode made urgent and five years have not answered.

Perspectives:
- Platform governance
- State regulators
- Open process advocates
- Speech liberalists

Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw 

Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:

• Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles

• AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?

• Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.

This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)

#openquestion 

Open Question March 11: Free Speech, but who draws the lines? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdx9n317Wpw 

Free speech rules and culture today have a huge impact on the future:

• Tech companies + algorithms determine who gets heard in 'public'... so government vs citizen doesn't touch today's real power struggles

• AI: when you can clone anyone’s voice or face, what’s protected and what’s harm?

• Political shifts: old arguments on who's defending or restricting speech (and why) don't hold, making it a topic where fresh thinking actually matters. Eg: The political left (eg ACLU defending neo-Nazis' right to march) used to be standard bearers, where now, the left is more likely to argue that unregulated speech causes real harm to marginalized communities.

This conversation will inform a live interview tomorrow with Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the leading free speech advocacy and litigation organization in the United States. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has led FIRE since 2001, growing it from a six-person operation to a 120-person powerhouse, and is the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Jonathan Haidt)

#openquestion 

Lies, Lies, Lies. There has never been a President, or a cabinet, or an administration in the history of America who's whole political platform, value system and political action exists and thrives on toxic lying until  now.  

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT 

Disasters as Political Fodder. Recently, a family member asked me if I knew about the LA fires.  I said "yes, it's terrible".  And they said "and they've proven that the fires were started by immigrants."  I burst out laughing derisively and said "yes, if they'd just shoot all the immigrants, everything would be fine."  It was not one of my finer moments, as sarcasm does't invite connection or understanding.  It invites the opposite, actually. 

When the plane and helicopter collided over the Potomac River a couple weeks ago, killing everyone, immediately the news was about the incompetence of air traffic controllers and the increasing treachery of flying brought on by lowering standards and selecting unqualified minorities and women for air traffic controller jobs.  This was without any data, any analysis, that indicated air traffic control was at fault. There was a dumb, affirmative action policy put in place years ago, that was then abandoned years ago.  That's what the news highighted.   

The Left uses disasters as fodder for their purposes as well.  They aren't in controll of the narative right now, so I'm writing about what's here.  Politics are wicked.  I remember that, after the election, I was going to sit back and watch the political theatre unfolding while eating a metaphorical bowl of popcorn.  I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do, as what's happening is distressing, but I can't find any political action that would be effective.  

What I do know is that the investment of our time in people, through Relatefulness and Uptrust, is real, powerful, joyful work for something good and true.  I am resting on that.