I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web services, they shouldn’t be in charge of things like sound epidemiology.
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.