Fact checker folly

Not qualified - nobody is

If you're a fact checker, you're not qualified to be a fact checker.

1

If you really knew how to critique scientific papers and claims made using them, you'd be doing something better. You'd not be in a cubicle at Twitter with a rule book.

2

Moreover, if you're sophisticated enough to critique sophisticated arguments, you'd be sophisticated enough to know that this is folly.

Where do you start? Do we shut down flat Earther videos? Chappaquiddick theories? Pineapple on pizza holdouts?

How?

For every field of endeavour we can find multiple qualified and respected schools of thought, all of whom think all the others are demonstrably loony. What then?

3

Most of all, the only way to get to better answers is to give lots of ideas the light of day.

There are laws that rule out truly unhelpful and damaging thoughts and words. But regular crazy ideas? Well, we need them.

It's like the classic 1997 Apple advert said,

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”.

And make no mistake, many people are crazy. Some just crazy. Some crazy with brilliant ideas. And some crazy with terrible ideas that ought to be argued into oblivion.

So argue them into oblivion.

One way we have never progressed reliably towards better thinking is via anonymous armies of fact checkers, sitting in cubicles at Big Tech headquarters, wielding rule books written by who knows who, handing down censorship.