Google Medic Algorithm change

I do expect you to understand the basic logical concept that criminals and their associates don't go out in public bragging about their criminal activities. And they certainly wouldn't allow it to be investigated or talked about via platforms they control and people they pay. Therefore you can't rationally expect to find such stories on their platforms. You must go to alternatives.

So what? Unless you’re arguing that public employees engaged in critiminal activity are able to cover it up by controlling the media, because...“the guberment”?

Remember when the existence of the "Bilderberg Group", the annual meeting of hyper rich commanders of industry, media and government from multiple countries used to be a conspiracy theory associated with people who also believed that the world was controlled by reptillian aliens?

If their existence was supposed to be a secret, they weren’t doing a very good job, considering that there has been Encycolpedia Britannica entry on the group for decades.

Of course you're not, because you didn't watch Richard Henne's video presenting the direct recordings, of the police interviews of him and his family and other things around his case and comparing it to what the investigators officially wrote down in their affidavits and reports that I linked above, thus proving the police outright fabricated evidence against him.

You’re right, I missed that there was a second video. I’ve watched it now. It’s not particularly damning or believeable. A few minor details seem to have been misstated. A deflated non-eleastic balloon has a larger circumference than when it is inflated. The police officer believed Mayumi when she said she understood what a hoax was. The 911 call stuff is confusing given that he says he made the call while Mayumi contacted the news, but the recordings have her on the phone to 911 while he’s yelling/swearing to someone about helicopters in the background. The blood sugar stuff wasn’t a particularly valid concern. Sure, he should take his insulin, but it doesn’t turn your blood into syrup, like he claimed. And it wouldn’t prevent him taking a polygraph test. And the police had nothing to do with his claimed sleep deprivation.

I don’t know why you’re skeptical of some stuff, and then seem to swallow whole obvious crap. It’s this kind of “logic” that makes me glad I avoid the hidden forums. Everyone lies to protect their interests, indeed. 

Linda

So what? Unless you’re arguing that public employees engaged in critiminal activity are able to cover it up by controlling the media, because...“the guberment”?

Although its more complicated than that, involving money back and forth. It does ultimately boil down to it, yes. Government is largely defined as those who have a monopoly on the socially acceptable use of violence and coercion. You can't start with that, and not end in totalitarianism of one form or another. It's baked right in. I mean, quite literally legislation is being put forward to do just that with the media, it's already advanced further in europe, Literally yes, they can commit criminal acts and cover it up because they're the ones who make the laws and have the guns.

If their existence was supposed to be a secret, they weren’t doing a very good job, considering that there has been Encycolpedia Britannica entry on the group for decades.

That's right, but if you dared think that this group of people was collaborating to influence public policy to their own ends, you were just crazy. Naturally the idea that it even existed was considered part of teh craziness despite the very blatant evidence against that. It's like how everyone thinks Edward Snowden was the one who exposed the NSA, but ignore NSA whistleblowers like Russel Tice and others who came out years earlier only to be ignored by that same media. Such things are known as limited hangouts, a tactic to release pressure when the population starts getting too wise to some form of corruption or similar. Though in that case specifically it was also probably a form of normalizing mass surveillance to the population to see what the reaction was. What was once the craziest of crazy conspiracy theories is now a matter of mundane, everyday reality.

Skeptics always parrot the "but someone would've talked" meme, and then ignore all the people who DO talk. Preferring the source bias of "Well if it's not on TV then it's probably not true."

You’re right, I missed that there was a second video. I’ve watched it now. It’s not particularly damning or believeable. A few minor details seem to have been misstated. A deflated non-eleastic balloon has a larger circumference than when it is inflated. The police officer believed Mayumi when she said she understood what a hoax was. The 911 call stuff is confusing given that he says he made the call while Mayumi contacted the news, but the recordings have her on the phone to 911 while he’s yelling/swearing to someone about helicopters in the background. The blood sugar stuff wasn’t a particularly valid concern. Sure, he should take his insulin, but it doesn’t turn your blood into syrup, like he claimed. And it wouldn’t prevent him taking a polygraph test. And the police had nothing to do with his claimed sleep deprivation.

I don’t know why you’re skeptical of some stuff, and then seem to swallow whole obvious crap. It’s this kind of “logic” that makes me glad I avoid the hidden forums. Everyone lies to protect their interests, indeed. 

Linda

What you left out of this is a lot more telling than what you left in. I had more here before but I decided I should just leave it at this.

James Corbett also, by the way, sources primarily mainstream sources. Often joking in his videos "But don't take my word for it, this is coming from [insert source here]" Or "And this isn't crazy conspiracy theorist James Corbett saying this, this is [insert source here]" which he then shows you on scren and links to so you can check it out yourself, and encourages you to do so. So you saying he's unreliable is always hilarious given his sources and encouragement for critical discussion of his work AND that he has more than one video admitting fault for things  he got wrong. Totally the traits of an unreliable source right?

But go on and tell me that I'm just swallowing stuff whole and being irrational. I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but that's okay because I really don't have to. I provided some links and things to think about and other people can look into it and come to their own conclusions. I don't aim to do any more than that.

Although its more complicated than that, involving money back and forth. It does ultimately boil down to it, yes. Government is largely defined as those who have a monopoly on the socially acceptable use of violence and coercion. You can't start with that, and not end in totalitarianism of one form or another. It's baked right in. I mean, quite literally legislation is being put forward to do just that with the media, it's already advanced further in europe, Literally yes, they can commit criminal acts and cover it up because they're the ones who make the laws and have the guns.

My point was that clearly they can't always cover it up, given that there are too many news stories about the malfeasance of police officers and police departments. So it doesn't work as some kind of blanket excuse as to why a particular story is or is not making the rounds. Rather, actual evidence would need to be presented (to someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist). 

That's right, but if you dared think that this group of people was collaborating to influence public policy to their own ends, you were just crazy. Naturally the idea that it even existed was considered part of teh craziness despite the very blatant evidence against that. It's like how everyone thinks Edward Snowden was the one who exposed the NSA, but ignore NSA whistleblowers like Russel Tice and others who came out years earlier only to be ignored by that same media. Such things are known as limited hangouts, a tactic to release pressure when the population starts getting too wise to some form of corruption or similar. Though in that case specifically it was also probably a form of normalizing mass surveillance to the population to see what the reaction was. What was once the craziest of crazy conspiracy theories is now a matter of mundane, everyday reality.

Skeptics always parrot the "but someone would've talked" meme, and then ignore all the people who DO talk. Preferring the source bias of "Well if it's not on TV then it's probably not true."

Look, I don't doubt that people conspire to commit crimes and cover them up to the best of their ability. Nor do I doubt that people with power and influence have a further reach than those without. Nor do I doubt that there is all sorts of behind-the-scenes collusion/manipulation/coercion among some leaders of industry and politics. What I doubt is that the conspiracy theory movement has validly identified any of that, except perhaps by accident. I don't know of an example where a nefarious plot was uncovered, not by getting the attention of those who are most interested/involved in uncovering crimes, but by amateurs taking it to the street. For example, you mention Russell Tice as though there hadn't been coverage of his claims in the mainstream media (e.g. New York Times, ABC news).

Fortunately(?), within my areas of expertise, there live a number of conspiracy theories so I can evaluate how well these techniques perform. Corbett gets them wrong. Not only that, but he fails to identify the valid and legitimate conspiracies within those fields. That is why I identify him as unreliable.

So in the end, if what we are interested in is the truth, what are we loosing if valid and reliable information is slightly more accessible to us than misinformation?

Linda

My point was that clearly they can't always cover it up, given that there are too many news stories about the malfeasance of police officers and police departments. So it doesn't work as some kind of blanket excuse as to why a particular story is or is not making the rounds. Rather, actual evidence would need to be presented (to someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist). 

The hilarious thing is how right you are. Its not even that that can't often cover it up, they can't even usually cover it up. Certainly not without making it look like a cover up. That's what makes it so annoying when people act like its crazy because, seriously, have they never looked in a history book? This stuff constantly happens.

For a good example of what you're talking about with presenting actual evidence, and how that unfortunately isn't as persuasive as you'd think it would be. I'd recommend checking out Richard Gage and the Architechs and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization. I'm gonna simplify his story here but he didn't get into it because he was a conspiracy theorist, he got into it because when he heard the official reason why building 7, a 47 story skyscraper, collapsed, at freefall velocity, into its own footprint, was ordinary office fires as NIST(I think it was) had reported, he was amazed because no skyscraper, ever, anywhere,has ever suffered such a catastrophic structural failure from mere office fires before. So if that' really what happened, that building should be the single most studied civil engineering disaster of all time. But that's not what was happening, it was barely talked about at all even within his own industry who would normally have been informed of all this. So he did his own looking and found a whole lot of problems with the official narrative of what happened in all three collapses.

Eventually founded AE911, which is now 3000+ members strong constituting something in the area of 25, 000+ years of experience on building design, construction and collapse. You'd think with that amount of professionals in the field having problems with the official narrative and putting together some incredibly good work on it demonstrating the issues, the narrative would've already changed. But, it hasn't. It's just too unbelievable to too many people. And a lot of it, according to him, is that other engineers haven't been informed of the actual data of the official studies as would normally happen for any situation like this in that industry. But  whenever they are they often join his side or shut up for fear of losing their job. Or they say, "Well, that's persuavsive, but someone would've talked"... which many actually have... Often resulting in the destruction of their lives and careers. Sometimes quite literally ending up mysteriously and suspiciously dead one day.

Look, I don't doubt that people conspire to commit crimes and cover them up to the best of their ability. Nor do I doubt that people with power and influence have a further reach than those without. Nor do I doubt that there is all sorts of behind-the-scenes collusion/manipulation/coercion among some leaders of industry and politics. What I doubt is that the conspiracy theory movement has validly identified any of that, except perhaps by accident. I don't know of an example where a nefarious plot was uncovered, not by getting the attention of those who are most interested/involved in uncovering crimes, but by amateurs taking it to the street. For example, you mention Russell Tice as though there hadn't been coverage of his claims in the mainstream media (e.g. New York Times, ABC news).

Linda

But that's the thing, the conspiracy movement ARE the ones exposing it, because the mainstream doesn't go near it. It was random people on the streets with cellphone cameras capturing the videos that became primary source evidence of what was going on in things like the Baltimore Riots. It was random people who would go up to the police who were just standing there letting all this happen and asking them "hey guys, why aren't you breaking all this up?" And one officer offhandedly and sarcastically responded more to himself "You should ask the police chief that" in a tone that highly suggested that he was wondering the exact same thing.  And this scenario, of police just letting riots go on like this happened multiple times with other bits of evidence coming out that strongly pointed to the idea that the police were ordered to stand down and let the destruction happen and be complicit in it. It wasn't the mainstream that was capturing those on the ground, in the thick of it, highly important pieces of evidence. It was average people. And because of that it was very easy to debunk a lot of the mainstream reporting on these events, because there was video evidence directly refuting it from multipe angles in many cases. Thus demonstrating mainstream bias and trying to construct a false narrative of what was going on.

There's no practical way for me to show you all of this evidence because there's just too much of it in too many different places. but at the time there were youtubers like Sargon of Akkad(before he went kinda crazy) who did a very good job compiling all of these things together while also sourcing them for people to see. It was through their efforts that people learned what was really happening on the ground in these cases and why its now known as a sort of mundane fact that a lot of it was very engineered or at least allowed to occur in order to justify other moves in the government and universities. In fact, at one time, he as a single person was pulling in more traffic that the entirety of the Washington Post. And it became rather clear that they really didn't like that. Especially since he and others were routinely showing them up for their poor journalistic integrity.

This is why the fake news paradigm came to be. This is why trust in mainstream media has dropped like a stone. People got to see the obvious, blatant lies, corruption and favoritism. All the attempts to manipulate public opinion and push society in a certain direction for the benefit of the rich and powerful and their bought and paid for government pawns. This is why all these companies and agencies are seeking to crack down on the internet. Google's medic algorithm stuff is guaranteed to be part of that, as it fits the patterns found in all the other cases.

Seriously, if he still has those videos up, go back to his stuff from between around 2013-2016, especially his, "This Week In Stupid" series. It was pretty insane. Likewise TL;DR, Vernaculus, Computing Forever, Naked Ape, as just a few that I can think of off the top of my head that were covering some of this stuff around the same time. Though some did it better than others.

Fortunately(?), within my areas of expertise, there live a number of conspiracy theories so I can evaluate how well these techniques perform. Corbett gets them wrong. Not only that, but he fails to identify the valid and legitimate conspiracies within those fields. That is why I identify him as unreliable.

So in the end, if what we are interested in is the truth, what are we loosing if valid and reliable information is slightly more accessible to us than misinformation?

Email him about it, he'd probably be really grateful. At least if you can give him some actual evidence suporting it and not just "well I know a lot about it and you're wrong." You'd probably end up helping quite a lot.

For a good example of what you're talking about with presenting actual evidence, and how that unfortunately isn't as persuasive as you'd think it would be. I'd recommend checking out Richard Gage and the Architechs and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization. I'm gonna simplify his story here but he didn't get into it because he was a conspiracy theorist, he got into it because when he heard the official reason why building 7, a 47 story skyscraper, collapsed, at freefall velocity, into its own footprint, was ordinary office fires as NIST(I think it was) had reported, he was amazed because no skyscraper, ever, anywhere,has ever suffered such a catastrophic structural failure from mere office fires before. So if that' really what happened, that building should be the single most studied civil engineering disaster of all time. But that's not what was happening, it was barely talked about at all even within his own industry who would normally have been informed of all this. So he did his own looking and found a whole lot of problems with the official narrative of what happened in all three collapses.

Eventually founded AE911, which is now 3000+ members strong constituting something in the area of 25, 000+ years of experience on building design, construction and collapse. You'd think with that amount of professionals in the field having problems with the official narrative and putting together some incredibly good work on it demonstrating the issues, the narrative would've already changed. But, it hasn't. It's just too unbelievable to too many people. And a lot of it, according to him, is that other engineers haven't been informed of the actual data of the official studies as would normally happen for any situation like this in that industry. But  whenever they are they often join his side or shut up for fear of losing their job. Or they say, "Well, that's persuavsive, but someone would've talked"... which many actually have... Often resulting in the destruction of their lives and careers. Sometimes quite literally ending up mysteriously and suspiciously dead one day.

But that's the thing, the conspiracy movement ARE the ones exposing it, because the mainstream doesn't go near it. It was random people on the streets with cellphone cameras capturing the videos that became primary source evidence of what was going on in things like the Baltimore Riots. It was random people who would go up to the police who were just standing there letting all this happen and asking them "hey guys, why aren't you breaking all this up?" And one officer offhandedly and sarcastically responded more to himself "You should ask the police chief that" in a tone that highly suggested that he was wondering the exact same thing.  And this scenario, of police just letting riots go on like this happened multiple times with other bits of evidence coming out that strongly pointed to the idea that the police were ordered to stand down and let the destruction happen and be complicit in it. It wasn't the mainstream that was capturing those on the ground, in the thick of it, highly important pieces of evidence. It was average people. And because of that it was very easy to debunk a lot of the mainstream reporting on these events, because there was video evidence directly refuting it from multipe angles in many cases. Thus demonstrating mainstream bias and trying to construct a false narrative of what was going on.

I'm not talking about whether or not information is discovered and presented by ordinary people. Of course it is. What I am talking about is whether or not this information goes anywhere - whether it spreads among those people who are in the best position to evaluate what it means, and from there spreads to the general public when it is found to be valid by those with expertise.

For starters, we are all in agreement, I hope, that one simple explanation for why something doesn't go mainstream is because there is no validity to the idea to begin with. Flat Eartherism isn't mainstream because the idea isn't valid (although I know that there are probably some here who would argue the idea, let's ignore that for the moment). No government cover-up explanation is necessary to explain why it isn't in the mainstream press or taught in astronomy courses.

This possibility also applies to the examples you have brought up. Maybe the mainstream press didn't pick up on Heene's impassioned defense because his claims aren't particularly believable or damning. For example, one look at his phone records would tell you the order in which phone calls were made, but Heene didn't offer those up, probably because they don't back up his claims. In an aside which Heene makes at the start of playing the 911 recording, he offers an excuse for why the records show a "late 911 call", which suggests the records show the news was called second and 911 third. And I wouldn't expect a journalist to buy that excuse (it's obviously false). Any interest from a journalist would dissipate pretty quickly if they were unimpressed by the "evidence".

Similarly, there would be no surprise if AE911 didn't manage to spread among experts in building collapse, if the findings from NIST weren't as unusual as Gage interpreted them to be. 

Conspiracy Theories aren't distinguished by whether or not unpleasant truths are being uncovered, and who is doing the uncovering. They are distinguished by a disconnect between whether or not the theories (used in its informal sense) are seen as valid by those people with the most knowledge and experience in the field. By "taking it to the street" I mean the practice of making your case to relative lay-people because you haven't been able to get the experts on board. And because it doesn't spread among those people with knowledge and experience, then elaborate narratives need to be formed about government cover-ups and fear of reprisals and close-mindedness and sheeple and fake news in order to justify the continued promotion of these ideas in the teeth of expert apathy.

Yes, because people with expertise are not a homogenous group, there is always lively and contentious discussion about various ideas. So you can always find at least a handful of experts who are in support of a particular idea. The test of that idea, which is determined by its validity (the evidence (used in the scientific sense) for or against it) is whether or not it spreads to other people within the field, then to people in closely related fields, and then more broadly to the general public. The population in which the ideas promoted by AE911 should spread numbers in the tens of million. So only 3000+ after 18 years of this means it didn't spread in the way a valid idea would spread.

And it's not just a matter of "they haven't been informed of the actual data." All the successful ideas start out the same way, with only a handful of people aware of the data and its implications. But the greater the validity of that data, the faster it spreads. AE911 has had the opportunity to get the data they think supports their claim to a broader group - for example, they presented it at the American Institute of Architects conference in 2015, without much spread from there (less than 5% found it compelling enough to support the idea of asking for a new investigation in WTC7).   

This is why the fake news paradigm came to be. This is why trust in mainstream media has dropped like a stone. People got to see the obvious, blatant lies, corruption and favoritism. All the attempts to manipulate public opinion and push society in a certain direction for the benefit of the rich and powerful and their bought and paid for government pawns. This is why all these companies and agencies are seeking to crack down on the internet. Google's medic algorithm stuff is guaranteed to be part of that, as it fits the patterns found in all the other cases.

Or, this narrative becomes necessary to find a way to excuse the non-acceptance of various Conspiracy Theories.

As I said, the way to show that your concerns are valid are not by posting complaints from site which are offering up misinformation to sell their products (like Jon Barron or Dr. Mercola), but by showing that sites which offer valid but not mainstream information have suffered. Mayo Clinic and WebMD are not coming up earlier in the search because Google is a government pawn. It's because they are offering valid and reliable information. What exactly do you think is lost by ranking information in terms of validity and reliability?

Email him about it, he'd probably be really grateful. At least if you can give him some actual evidence suporting it and not just "well I know a lot about it and you're wrong." You'd probably end up helping quite a lot.

LOL. I've been through this many times before. What happens is that groups operating on the fringe become very selective about who or who is not an "expert". You see that here all the time. "Experts" are those who say what I want to hear and "close-minded government shills" are those who don't. The experts in statistics and the evaluation of evidence here and on Skeptiko are not Jay or myself (based on knowledge and experience), but people like Maanelli or Hurmanetar who say what people want to hear. If validity and reliability were in play here, it would be an entirely different conversation.

Linda

Along the same lines, the BBC has an item about someone known as Medical Medium (real name Anthony William), who is the founder of the Global Celery Juice Movement, and who claims to receive guidance from something called Spirit of Compassion:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-49763144

Austin Chiang, the founder of the Association for Healthcare Social Media, feels that there needs to be better vetting of medical information online, and that it might be helpful to introduce a verification process.

fls

I think there is a significant distinction between assisted suicide and suicide.

I've taken follow-up questions to Stan's nbtruthmans censorship thread. I looked for a censorship thread from Stan, but didn't find it. Is it in the hidden part of the forum?

Linda

To follow up from the discussion taking place here:

Is there any point at which we might expect agreement? For example, should bullying someone into killing themselves be at all restricted?

Linda