A reasonable debate about Ivermectin

But effectively assigning a 100% probability to big questions (there's no chance I'm wrong, so there's nothing that will change my mind) is a huge red flag for me. Bill Nye isn't 100% certain that creationism is wrong. Richard Dawkins isn't 100% certain that God doesn't exist. 

That's not what "assigning 100% probability" looks like. Look at anticipated behaviors, rather than what people claim to believe in.

Imagine, if instead of talking about a (seemingly, to you) difficult question like "Does ivermectin work?", it was a painfully obvious one like "Do you have a nose?". If she had been asked "What would convince you that you don't have a nose?" and she responded "I have a nose", would not the subtext obviously be "and I'm not going to entertain your motivated attempts to gaslight me into questioning what I can see clear as day"? Would not that "Fuck you, you need to show me something surprising before I even take you seriously enough to engage with your (seemingly) nonsense hypotheticals" response seem fitting?

It's not "assigning 100% probability" just because they don't take your ideas seriously. It's "assigning 100% probability" when no matter the evidence, the needle on their belief doesn't move. If you were to say "What if I gave you a mirror and it showed you to have no nose?", would she say "It wouldn't show that", or would she say "I would believe it's fancy CGI on a screen disguised as a mirror"? Because only the latter is claiming to ignore the evidence; the former is just predicting that the test won't show that. If you were actually hand her a mirror so that she could see her missing nose and the bleeding wound where it was, would stick to that rationalization or would she exclaim "OMG what happened to my nose!"? Because only the latter is actually ignoring the evidence, and the state of mind that produces "I have a nose" in almost everyone when asked that question would also give "OMG!" if it manages to be shown to be wrong.

She still might be overconfident, but you can't jump from "She thinks the chance of being wrong is too small to continue thinking about" to "She's *over* confident" until you can demonstrate what her proper level of confidence should be. And while you might not buy her arguments, I do expect that she has thought about it and would be ready to argue the case that the proper level of confidence is high.

Absent evidence that she hasn't actually thought things through, it strikes me more as "Not significant evidence", or rather "Evidence that either the question is overdetermined OR that she's crazy" than "red flag". It really looks like a failure of communication on both sides here.

She should have explained herself better: The equivalent of "Well, the thing is that all of the things which could prove to me that I have no nose are already tests I've done and they've all come back showing that I have a nose. I looked in the mirror right before I came here, for example. I'm feeling it with my fingers right now, as you can see. Theoretically it's possible to be wrong about anything, but it'd have to somehow be in a way that causes my nose to consistently show up where I expect it to be, and I can't imagine any realistic way for that to happen, can you?"

On the other side, they could have understood that this is what she (most likely) meant, and responded to "I have a nose" with "So you would then expect to see it if I handed you a mirror, right?" and try to do the work themselves to find a possibility that she hasn't already though through, and help clarify what her model actually is, what it's based on, and what predictions it makes.

It's also worth noting that Dawkins claiming he "doesn't absolutely know" and is "a six out of seven" isn't really demonstrative of the virtue of humility either. "Nothing is 100% certain" is what you're supposed to say when you're on team science, but it doesn't mean you're actively tracking that remaining uncertainty or doing anything other than giving lip service to the right ideas for that crowd. Watch any Dawkins debate and ask yourself whether he's really acting the way you'd expect him to act if he thought the betting odds on him being wrong were really as bad as 1 in 7. If *I* thought there was anywhere near a 1 in 7 chance of Christianity being more right than I was, I'd sure as hell be a little more respectful of it than Dawkins is!

Huh? I'm not sure how this didn't come across in my post. I'm against censorship, but I'm not an absolutist.

It's fine. I too could have been more clear:

If you want to know what [free speech absolutists] have to say about [fill in the blank] you could look it up [or post a question].

Richard Dawkins isn't 100% certain that God doesn't exist. 

I'm not sure it's irrational to reject the existence of infinity. (And thus things which involve such a thing, whether it's infinite power, knowledge, or an infinitely high stack of turtles.*)

*If the earth is flat, what is it sitting on? (Might be in 'a history of time', perhaps the introduction.)

If there's no evidence that will change someone's mind on an issue like this, it I will say with a high probability that they're not thinking rationally about that topic. 

That (probably) makes sense. That being said, I think people thinking rationally might have 'stronger' (or more intense) positions than yours - though I don't know it in its entirety, so that's just a guess. (For instance, while I'm not a fan of misinformation, I think that parties (government or otherwise) that work to control speech may be a threat to...well everything? Like, how do you have democracy without freedom of information and speech?)

Given photoDNA is a black box consisting of (something like) hashes, have there ever been attempts to abuse that to restrict other types of pictures?

While I'm here:

If you poke around here, he might have had something relevant to say. I remember a quote at least:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20210414043231/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ if you like https.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200629030500if_/https://snew.notabug.io/r/all Here it is:

I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug

That we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other.

And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent,

we should fight back - both politically through protest and technologically through software

— Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)

I don't think the website is run by someone who is dead, though for all I know he was involved with the project while alive. So what's the source?

That link (above 'bits...') goes here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201013131802/http://archive.is/d4NPt

You might find that article relevant. (If you get bored while reading stuff you've already heard/agree with, skip to the relevant section by scrolling; the article is relatively short, and what you're looking for will be towards the end.)

(I'm starting to think I should have made a linkpost, and directed you to that.)