Podcast for Inquiry S01E10: William B. Davis: On Acting …and life.

William Davis is best known as the Cigarette Smoking Man on the popular TV show The X-Files. He is also the founder of The William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study and has just published a new book On Acting…and Life. William and I discuss how his presence on The X-Files expanded from the silent portrayal he gave in the pilot to the series’ most frequent recurring role, the importance of seeing the world from the perspective of the character you are portraying, and how William’s undergraduate education in philosophy informed both his career and his worldview. We discuss many tips, tricks, and traps to help any aspiring actor, and William shares a few insights that did not make it into the book. 

Listen to our conversation here:

A video recording is also available:

I've been censored!

On February 20 2020, I gave a public talk at Nerd Nite Toronto called Stab Everyone You Love. It was about the "ZYX of Vaccine Denialism" (because anti-vaxxers get everything backward). At the time, we knew that there was an outbreak of some disease in China, but not that it would soon become a global pandemic.

My son recorded my speech, which debunked several myths about the supposed dangers of national immunization programs. I uploaded the video to YouTube one day after my talk, and posted the video (and the subsequent Q&A session) to this blog the following month. 

One pandemic and two years later, on April 26, 2022, I received a letter from YouTube. It stated that they think my presentation violated their "medical misinformation policy", and thus removed my video from YouTube. 

YouTube has an appeals process. I clicked on the link, and wrote that my presentation debunked medical misinformation - I explained several erroneous beliefs about vaccines in my presentation so my audience would be more effective at rebutting them. 

Seconds after submitting, YouTube sent a second email stating they had "reviewed your content carefully, and had confirmed that it violates our medical misinformation policy. [...] We won't be putting your content back up on YouTube." Clearly, this was an automated process - there was no time for a human to read my appeal before I received the email stating it had been denied.

This experience highlights several problems with any censorship (or "moderation") regime:

1. Who decides what's acceptable?
2. How do you ensure none of the bad stuff escapes your filter?
3. How do you ensure none of the acceptable stuff gets caught in your filter?

I'm pretty sure I'm an accidental victim of 3). I doubt that anyone at YouTube watched my presentation. It probably contained enough keywords that an algorithm determined it was "medical disinformation" based on a machine-generated transcript. I wasn't peddling medical misinformation, but no one at YouTube will watch the video to find out. And now, nobody else will, either.

I presented Stab Everyone You Love for the Centre for Inquiry Canada and Toronto Oasis virtually later that year. Those videos are still online - so far. It may just be a matter of time before they are taken down as well, for the same reason. 

Take care before endorsing censorship regimes. They tend to target the very communities they were ostensibly set up to protect.

Podcast for Inquiry S01E09: Howard Doughty on Academic Freedom and Post-Secondary Education

Howard Doughty has been a college professor for over 40 years and has grave concerns about the changes he’s seen in colleges and universities. Howard describes the nature, scope and limitations of academic freedom, and how that has changed over the decades. The increasing corporate influence in universities has in some cases supplanted the original purpose of the university, according to Howard. We discuss how students are different today than when he started teaching, and whether they should view their post-secondary endeavor as an educational opportunity, or a glorified job training program.

Listen to our conversation here:

A video recording is also available: