[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY

(this is an unsolved problem that exists in many domains from long before AI)

Indeed with the point at infinity you can simplify geometry by dispensing with Euclid's 5th postulate. There are no parallel lines, any two lines intersect at a single point just the same way as any two points are intersected by a single line, and the intersection points of the lines we call "parallel" simply happen to be "at infinity" (outside the set of ordinary finite coordinates).

The vanishing point in a perspective drawing is a point with a value that is literally beyond the finite coordinates of any object. And you don't need to be looking at a drawing to see it.

In a certain regard its an accounting trick. Saying parallel lines meet at infinity is literally like saying "lets schedule this meeting for never", except the mathematicians added an actual box to the calendar for a date called "never" as an accounting hack, but the hack works so well you really have to wonder if it might actually be a real date or if its just an incredibly useful fiction.

Aren't all numbers just incredibly useful fictions?

Why is a date called never / a point at infinity any different?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/20/7b/ae/207bae64d2488373fd4a...

Wait is this still about AI?

Amazingly he still passed.

1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.

2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.

I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.

A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.

So in response.

It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.

People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.

As I put it, the older understanding of the universe working in mechanical ways does not imply the universe is actually a machine nor that it was built by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we build machines. Likewise, the newer understanding of the universe working in computational ways does not imply the universe is actually running on some computer nor that its code was written by someone or for some purpose similar to the way we run simulations.