Why should I care about what these CEOs are saying when recent history shows they a) gladly lie about this subject and b) suffer exactly zero consequences when caught lying about this subject?
It's useful to know what people are thinking when they are the ones making meaningful decisions. Even if you don't trust them to be honest (which I don't think is a valid criticism here, there's not much in the quoted text that could be construed as "lying"), if you want to take issue with their actions in the future or have insight into what they may/may not do it's useful to get something from the horse's mouth.
This is the difference between British law and American law. People often get confused with the definition of free speech since in America it refers to the 1st amendment which only applies to censorship by the government. Britain actually does allow the government to censor speech.
The article does give insight into the Brit's definition of free speech. In America private companies can moderate their own platform since they are also liable for that platform. It is a thin line between the two.
I am not sure which I prefer but I notice I get spooked when government gets involved in free speech.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The definition of free speech is not at all limited to the absence of legal constrictions. Russell addresses this quite directly in "Free Thought…":
»When we speak of anything as “free,” our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from. Whatever or whoever is “free” is not subject to some external compulsion, and to be precise we ought to say what this kind of compulsion is.
…
Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.«
I see all the time in modern discussions that people use the same words but have different definitions in their head of what those words mean.
It might be that in the UK when people say "Free Speech" they mean Bertrand Russell's definition. I give the article that leeway since I don't know. But in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.
When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.
This might be my imagination - but I think you changed "Free Speech" to "Freedom of Expression." If so, this change makes a lot of sense. This change captures the intent of your article without confusion.
> in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment
Isn't it quite presumtive of you to assume that everyone means the same thing by "Free Speech". That seems highly unlikely to me.
> When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that words or phrases have a single globally umambiguous meaning. Typically maintaining productive communication means avoiding using contested/controversial terms like "free speech" in an unqualified way entirely and creating and exaplaining new terms to disambiguate exactly which version of the concept you mean.
> when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.
But "free speech" predates both Russel and the 1st Amendment. And, how do you know what they mean? It's not like the debate is settled and there's no controversy around the issue.
We are talking about a company based in San Francisco.
I am pretty sure they changed the phrase to "freedom of expression" and removed the passage that said this was the original definition of free speech so in my mind they corrected the article enough to get their point across without getting bogged down.
Wouldn't changing the phrase to "1st Amendment" get their point across even better, if that's what they meant? It's 8 characters shorter than "freedom of expression", so if anything it's the latter that's bogging things down.
I don't agree that "freedom of speech" in the US is only and always equated with the First Amendment. Even if it were, the article is unambiguously concerned with the broader principle, so we should consider the article in that context.
I pushed back on your mention of the distinction mainly due to a growing tendency in which people dismiss concerns about constraints on freedom of speech/expression/opinion by arguing such concerns are only valid insofar as the First Amendment applies. (Not to say you were doing that yourself.) At best it's a tiresome debate tactic; to the extent it's believed, it's a dangerously narrow misapprehension of one of our fundamental social tenets and civil rights.
Here's one issue I see with American law... which is that the (US) government has, in the past, passed laws (such as the Sedition Laws) and it takes a long time for those cases to get to the Supreme Court, so if the government wants to curtail speech arbitrarily (albeit temporarily) they can.
> People often get confused with the definition of free speech since in America it refers to the 1st amendment which only applies to censorship by the government.
You think Americans are incapable of distinguishing between the idea of free speech, and the legal doctrine of the 1st amendment?
The UK didn't have a formal legal guarantee of free speech until the Human Rights Act 1998, and even that comes with some qualifiers that Americans are uncomfortable with.
At the time of Russell's speech, 1922, all the old apparatus of censorship was still in place; the theatre was under the censorship of the Lord Chaimberlain until the 60s, as were books prior to the Lady Chatterly trial. Meanwhile, free speech haven the US was passing one of the Comstock Acts that made it illegal to distribute information on contraception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws#cite_note-5
I'm just old enough to remember when an elected UK politician (Gerry Adams) was legally barred from speaking on television at all.
Section 5 of the Public Order Act makes it an arrestable offence to swear in public. This is very very selectively enforced.
(As for the other bit of the first amendment, can't get much more British than an establishment of religion; it was one of the things many of the colonists were specifically fleeing)
Trump was an abomination and a troll. He should have been blocked from the platform a long time before he actually was deplatformed. The worls is a better place without thst eternal loser spewing lies out through Twitter. It's not okay.
It’s simply not possible to be a good human being and also downvote this. It’s absolutely on-topic, absolutely critical to the subject of Trump’s deplatforming, and absolutely irrefutable in terms of the facts of what the man has said and done.
Anyone downvoting should be ashamed and sickened by their behavior, no matter what rationalization they are attempting to hide behind.
a person can think trump is a self-serving, sociopathic idiot, and still defend his humanness against inflammatory, repressive impulses like this. neoliberal media like npr and nyt have lost this perspective entirely and have thrown in with the pitchforkers, so it's unfortunately not surprising that this simplistic view has infiltrated this discussion.
moreover, it's better for the future if we make the population aware of, and thereby immune to, his type of purely self-serving rhetoric, than try to erase him from the discussion, and thereby violate all kinds of human rights, let alone human decency. it's the same distinction as that of training an immune system for future infection vs. neutralizing one virus particle.
Based on how he's treated everyone around him for his entire life, he doesn't have any.
>it's better for the future if we make the population aware of, and thereby immune to, his type of purely self-serving rhetoric, than try to erase him from the discussion, and thereby violate all kinds of human rights
Then why did threats and violence decline when he was deplatformed? Why did an insurrection happen on January 6th when he was on Twitter and why didn't one happen on March 4th (the other important date in this "conspiracy") when he wasn't on Twitter? I think you have your cause and effect backwards. Giving terrible people a platform doesn't inoculate anyone, it just spreads more poison. I don't need to be exposed to a particular prejudice to think that prejudice is bad.
It’s not a matter of belief at this point. Trump’s actions and the lasting racist, white supremacist, batshit conspiracy-as-justified-fascism damage he’s done are so flagrantly severe that it’s strictly impossible for a moral person to see it any other way. It’s one of very few issues where moral relativism and gray areas just sincerely are not acceptable points of view.
I understand that you're very angry about the situation. A lot of things Trump has made me angry. I'd like to express my anger in a way that doesn't involve trying to make others feel ashamed about their own actions or beliefs. It's not easy - it's very much part of our culture to call each other names and judge others as good or bad.
Supporting or defending Trump is shameful though. The only healthy response our society can possibly have is to try to make supporters understand why it is shameful and unacceptable.
Your response is kind of scary to me because you’re essentially advocating tolerance and diplomacy with extreme racists and fascists (in no sense is that hyperbole).
> The only healthy response our society can possibly have is to try to make supporters understand why it is shameful and unacceptable.
You are free to disagree with me, but I strongly believe that making claims like yours is shameful and unacceptable. Not because of Trump, but because it is the worst kind of demagogy, the one which is so loved by Christianity: to make a sacred moral thing from a topic, and to forbid even talk about it, because it is amoral.
The world is not painted in black and white, it is an important trait of the world. When you paint it in black and white you are making it easier to think about it, but you are provoking your mind to make a categorical mistakes of judgement. The more so in minds of your followers. And even more in their children. You are sacrificing long-term success of a crystal clear mind to a short-term gain. And I'm very doubtful that there is any gain from what you are doing.
> Your response is kind of scary to me because you’re essentially advocating tolerance and diplomacy with extreme racists and fascists (in no sense is that hyperbole).
"Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side"[1]
Please, notice the word "appear" in a quote. You are fighting an illusion, and therefore your fight will bring you no friends, just push away potential allies.
I’m sorry but you are just flat incorrect about this and the stakes are so high that being wrong about it in the way that you are wrong (conflating intolerance of fascism with demagogy) is deeply unacceptable and amounts to tacit support for a superseding attack on general democracy.
Remaining uncompromising in the constant pointing out that racism and fascism (which is what humanizing defense of Trump is equivalent to) are shamefully unacceptable is not itself any form of intolerance or absolutism, apart from democracy being a higher moral imperative than fairness or politeness extended towards violent racist actors and their sympathizers.
In some intensely immature, coddled “let’s go to the common room and discuss our feelings in the framework of ivory tower ethical philosophy” you are free to argue that this is just moral relativism and upholding basic human rights for people of all races is just one viewpoint and we should be philosophically neutral to consider other viewpoints even if one set of norms makes them appear abhorrent.
But that is so juvenile as to be completely ignored, and the appeal to rationalism principles from LessWrong in this example is just deeply absurd.
Defending or sympathizing with overt sociopathic racists and fascists is not the same thing as ideological safe space for debating norms that are hard to process within a given baseline ethical framework. It’s beyond ridiculous for you to act like your response is appropriate at all.
I'm not conflating, you are. If you use demagogy to show your intolerance of fascism, then you are still use demagogy. My country annexed a part of Ukraine, and do you know what propaganda says about it? I could tell you: it was not an annexation, because people of Crimea have chosen to go into Russia. I amused myself for sometime by trolling our patriots, and I know exactly how they think. They think that if one have a good moral reason to annex some land, than it is not an annexation. It is like if we have a good moral reason to execute a person, than it is not a homicide.
But this is not the way for a moral to work. If you asked Jesus would he think an execution is a homicide or not, how do you think he would answer?
> Remaining uncompromising in the...
It is politics. Politics is a mind killer. Either you are uncompromising, or you have a working mind. It is up to you to choose your side. Read Yudkowski some more, you'll learn that a rational mind must allow itself to think any thoughts, because thoughts do not kill people, it is people who kills other people.
I was born and grown in a country were "to remain uncompromising" was a government policy and the basis of propaganda. And being a teenager I learned that to think about something is not the same as to compromise. To speak about something without requirement to do a ritual of the two minutes hate is not the same as compromising. I see now what happens in USA, all this shaming, cancel culture and such, it seems to me that USA is going to learn the lesson of uncompromising position and the difference between uncompromising position and freedom of thought and speech. Do this, make your country into a totalitarian state and tell me would you like it that way. I have a loads of popcorn and ready to watch the coming show.
I'm deeply suspicious of zealots. You behave like one. You look like you are ready to kill for an idea. You are a dangerous person. Ideas are immaterial, you should be concerned more about people and less about ideas. My country suffered a lot because some people valued ideas more than other people. Believe me, I could detect ideological warriors by looking from Moon without optics, and you seems to me exactly like one of them.
> But that is so juvenile as to be completely ignored, and the appeal to rationalism principles from LessWrong in this example is just deeply absurd.
What are you trying to achieve making irrational claims to reject rational arguments? Do you really believe it would work? Do you think that if you call my arguments absurd I would abandon them? Or if you hint that my thoughts are juvenile then it would have no other way but to conform? Or if you accuse me of racism, when I didn't say nothing racist yet, it would change my position?
Try to reread our conversation, please. Try to find a place where I showed a support for Trump, or said something racist, fascist. You wouldn't find any. All I did is I rejected to do a ritual of two minute hate after hearing stimulus 'Trump'. I'm not a Pavlovian dog and not a Skinner's pigeon to react to a stimulus by a predictable way. Moreover I empathically reject to participate in a hate behavior, regardless of the chosen hate target. And no moral reasoning from your side would change it. And yeah, no demagogy, and even no rational arguments would change it, because my rejection to hate stems from my moral position.
No. Absolutely not. Your comment amounts to nothing but gainsaying and is completely ridiculous.
It is not toxic to oppose wanton racism and fascism. If you are ashamed of opposing racism, then you are being toxic and you are enabling and sympathizing with racism. That’s on you.
You don’t get to just gainsay the opposition, claim it is “toxic” and then somehow have that treated like it’s on equal footing or deserves credibility in the same way that the original call outs of toxic racism or fascism themselves do.
You’re simply acting as part of the racist and fascist problem yourself at that point.
from a very broad conceptual viewpoint; "the law" exist from (or out of) written language (where "language" is seen as a social-technology).
what computer technology and the internet (or for short: software) is doing to civilization is still at a very early stage. As I see this, the goal of "law" and the goal of "computer science" are quite similar.
As I see these kinds of articles (stratechery focuses on exactly this), is that we're witnessing the 'adjustments' in society brought about by the invention of software. I put all of this on a level comparable to the invention of writing and the subsequent 'rise' of rule of law.
having said this, the difficult thing to make sense of, and to explain to people with less software-experience is coming to understand what this article taps into in the section of "the global internet"; it's actually quite tricky to pin this down for me right now.
I'm referring to that aspect (or quality) of software that causes several executives to say this kinds of things:
>We have tried to get to what’s common, and the reality is it’s super hard on a global basis to design software that behaves differently in different countries. It is super difficult.
>If you’re a global technology business, most of the time, it is far more efficient and legally compliant to operate a global model than to have different practices and standards in different countries.
It's that thing sowftware does in which special cases worsen software complexity.
Software (and computing, and even industrial automation) are all about doing the same thing, no matter what. It's all about finding ways to avoid special cases; to avoid code repetition; and all that.
I'm sure that most people in Hacker News, due to our hands-on experience with software, are quite able to intuitively grasp this. But it's not so easy to explain and this 'quality of the digital' is (and will continue to) forcing contemporary capitalism to be re-evaluated (or something along these lines).
This is a bit of a meta point but does anyone else feel fatigued by the sheer amount of text stratechery has been using to make a point as of late?
I'm an expert level skimmer and even I can't make sense of what this is about by simply skimming it. They taught me in highschool back in the day: make your point in an introduction, give supporting arguments in the body, conclude by repeating the point.
This seems to follow a 'trail of thought' style that just keeps going, as if it's a given that everyone's got 30 minutes to spare to find out if you're saying anything at all.
Trail of thought is fine for poetry and literature, this seems to attempt to make rational arguments? If so, the format's a disservice to that end.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I think it works for him though, his audience see themselves as "readers" and I think the prolixity adds a certain sheen of "seriousness" to his writing. I don't think he would hold the status of emerging thought-leader/authoritative thinker that he has in tech circles if he wrote quicker, punchier pieces.
I believe Collison's argument is that certain organizations affiliated with ex-President Trump should have been and were suspended from direct use of the Stripe API for "incitement to violence" in the time surrounding the certification of Electors by the U.S. Congress, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St.... But other organizations that were allied in some way with Trump were still able to use the API. So in effect, the Trump-related organizations could use the API indirectly.
With that reasoning, shouldn't there also be organizations on the left in the United States, which is defined as the progressive / liberal / socialist part of the political spectrum, that should have received the same treatment during the period of the George Floyd Protests, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests?
Maybe it's because I'm a sports official in my spare time, but I want the rules to be the same for everybody. It doesn't matter if they are written or not.
I just want there to be a clear standard in most cases and rule enforcement to be reasonably consistent, in all aspects of life.
The whole free speech argument is tired. I think people selectively draw from it and draw lines in it when it suits them. The point being, that as long as people don't acknowledge that private entities play more of a role today in free speech than they did in the past, it's not worth arguing. You'll need to wait until both sides have been affected by this perspective for it to become taboo.
A couple things I've been learning more recently in order to have more productive political discussions:
- Set goals for political discussion. If it's just to learn, then you don't need to debate. If you're going to debate, set ground rules so cross-political friendships are not lost. (This has been more important to me, but there's certainly people who put their political leanings on their dating profile.)
- Don't make points about bad faith actors or that collectively acknowledge their existence. The left has them, the right has them, we've likely all been affected by them, but the majority of each party are just normal people championing their favorite political football team.
- Citing morals is pretty low brow. Morals differ in different geographies due to a myriad of influences. Topics that center around this are an impossible hill to climb.
- Don't state your party affiliation (or lack thereof). I learned in 2016 that being anything other than Republican or Democrat invites reductive conversation, or put more directly it invites people to 'other' you which changes the trajectory of the conversation.
- Always assume good faith. Most people don't act in bad faith, yet in political discussions it's easy to reach for that branch. People I've assumed this about I've usually discovered lived a very different life from me, so their perspectives and worldviews align to things that don't make sense at all.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadThis is the difference between British law and American law. People often get confused with the definition of free speech since in America it refers to the 1st amendment which only applies to censorship by the government. Britain actually does allow the government to censor speech.
The article does give insight into the Brit's definition of free speech. In America private companies can moderate their own platform since they are also liable for that platform. It is a thin line between the two.
I am not sure which I prefer but I notice I get spooked when government gets involved in free speech.
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
»When we speak of anything as “free,” our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from. Whatever or whoever is “free” is not subject to some external compulsion, and to be precise we ought to say what this kind of compulsion is. … Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.«
It might be that in the UK when people say "Free Speech" they mean Bertrand Russell's definition. I give the article that leeway since I don't know. But in America when when people say "Free Speech" they mean the 1st Amendment which predated Bertrand Russell and is more common.
When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.
Isn't it quite presumtive of you to assume that everyone means the same thing by "Free Speech". That seems highly unlikely to me.
> When two people are communicating using common words the definition of those words need to be common otherwise communication does not happen. Otherwise you are just using jargon.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that words or phrases have a single globally umambiguous meaning. Typically maintaining productive communication means avoiding using contested/controversial terms like "free speech" in an unqualified way entirely and creating and exaplaining new terms to disambiguate exactly which version of the concept you mean.
But "free speech" predates both Russel and the 1st Amendment. And, how do you know what they mean? It's not like the debate is settled and there's no controversy around the issue.
I am pretty sure they changed the phrase to "freedom of expression" and removed the passage that said this was the original definition of free speech so in my mind they corrected the article enough to get their point across without getting bogged down.
I pushed back on your mention of the distinction mainly due to a growing tendency in which people dismiss concerns about constraints on freedom of speech/expression/opinion by arguing such concerns are only valid insofar as the First Amendment applies. (Not to say you were doing that yourself.) At best it's a tiresome debate tactic; to the extent it's believed, it's a dangerously narrow misapprehension of one of our fundamental social tenets and civil rights.
John Locke's 'A Letter Concerning Toleration', which also deals with free speech, predates your 1st amendment.
It is indeed common to conflate free speech with 1st amendment protections in the US, but it is still an error to do so.
John Locke, Adam Smith, etc.
You think Americans are incapable of distinguishing between the idea of free speech, and the legal doctrine of the 1st amendment?
https://xkcd.com/1357/
At the time of Russell's speech, 1922, all the old apparatus of censorship was still in place; the theatre was under the censorship of the Lord Chaimberlain until the 60s, as were books prior to the Lady Chatterly trial. Meanwhile, free speech haven the US was passing one of the Comstock Acts that made it illegal to distribute information on contraception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws#cite_note-5
I'm just old enough to remember when an elected UK politician (Gerry Adams) was legally barred from speaking on television at all.
Section 5 of the Public Order Act makes it an arrestable offence to swear in public. This is very very selectively enforced.
(As for the other bit of the first amendment, can't get much more British than an establishment of religion; it was one of the things many of the colonists were specifically fleeing)
Anyone downvoting should be ashamed and sickened by their behavior, no matter what rationalization they are attempting to hide behind.
moreover, it's better for the future if we make the population aware of, and thereby immune to, his type of purely self-serving rhetoric, than try to erase him from the discussion, and thereby violate all kinds of human rights, let alone human decency. it's the same distinction as that of training an immune system for future infection vs. neutralizing one virus particle.
> a person can think trump is a self-serving, sociopathic idiot, and still defend his humanness against inflammatory, repressive impulses like this.
You can do this, it just equates to a significant basic moral failing.
Based on how he's treated everyone around him for his entire life, he doesn't have any.
>it's better for the future if we make the population aware of, and thereby immune to, his type of purely self-serving rhetoric, than try to erase him from the discussion, and thereby violate all kinds of human rights
Then why did threats and violence decline when he was deplatformed? Why did an insurrection happen on January 6th when he was on Twitter and why didn't one happen on March 4th (the other important date in this "conspiracy") when he wasn't on Twitter? I think you have your cause and effect backwards. Giving terrible people a platform doesn't inoculate anyone, it just spreads more poison. I don't need to be exposed to a particular prejudice to think that prejudice is bad.
Do you really believe this or it is some kind of a trolling?
Your response is kind of scary to me because you’re essentially advocating tolerance and diplomacy with extreme racists and fascists (in no sense is that hyperbole).
You are free to disagree with me, but I strongly believe that making claims like yours is shameful and unacceptable. Not because of Trump, but because it is the worst kind of demagogy, the one which is so loved by Christianity: to make a sacred moral thing from a topic, and to forbid even talk about it, because it is amoral.
The world is not painted in black and white, it is an important trait of the world. When you paint it in black and white you are making it easier to think about it, but you are provoking your mind to make a categorical mistakes of judgement. The more so in minds of your followers. And even more in their children. You are sacrificing long-term success of a crystal clear mind to a short-term gain. And I'm very doubtful that there is any gain from what you are doing.
> Your response is kind of scary to me because you’re essentially advocating tolerance and diplomacy with extreme racists and fascists (in no sense is that hyperbole).
"Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side"[1]
Please, notice the word "appear" in a quote. You are fighting an illusion, and therefore your fight will bring you no friends, just push away potential allies.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
Remaining uncompromising in the constant pointing out that racism and fascism (which is what humanizing defense of Trump is equivalent to) are shamefully unacceptable is not itself any form of intolerance or absolutism, apart from democracy being a higher moral imperative than fairness or politeness extended towards violent racist actors and their sympathizers.
In some intensely immature, coddled “let’s go to the common room and discuss our feelings in the framework of ivory tower ethical philosophy” you are free to argue that this is just moral relativism and upholding basic human rights for people of all races is just one viewpoint and we should be philosophically neutral to consider other viewpoints even if one set of norms makes them appear abhorrent.
But that is so juvenile as to be completely ignored, and the appeal to rationalism principles from LessWrong in this example is just deeply absurd.
Defending or sympathizing with overt sociopathic racists and fascists is not the same thing as ideological safe space for debating norms that are hard to process within a given baseline ethical framework. It’s beyond ridiculous for you to act like your response is appropriate at all.
I'm not conflating, you are. If you use demagogy to show your intolerance of fascism, then you are still use demagogy. My country annexed a part of Ukraine, and do you know what propaganda says about it? I could tell you: it was not an annexation, because people of Crimea have chosen to go into Russia. I amused myself for sometime by trolling our patriots, and I know exactly how they think. They think that if one have a good moral reason to annex some land, than it is not an annexation. It is like if we have a good moral reason to execute a person, than it is not a homicide.
But this is not the way for a moral to work. If you asked Jesus would he think an execution is a homicide or not, how do you think he would answer?
> Remaining uncompromising in the...
It is politics. Politics is a mind killer. Either you are uncompromising, or you have a working mind. It is up to you to choose your side. Read Yudkowski some more, you'll learn that a rational mind must allow itself to think any thoughts, because thoughts do not kill people, it is people who kills other people.
I was born and grown in a country were "to remain uncompromising" was a government policy and the basis of propaganda. And being a teenager I learned that to think about something is not the same as to compromise. To speak about something without requirement to do a ritual of the two minutes hate is not the same as compromising. I see now what happens in USA, all this shaming, cancel culture and such, it seems to me that USA is going to learn the lesson of uncompromising position and the difference between uncompromising position and freedom of thought and speech. Do this, make your country into a totalitarian state and tell me would you like it that way. I have a loads of popcorn and ready to watch the coming show.
I'm deeply suspicious of zealots. You behave like one. You look like you are ready to kill for an idea. You are a dangerous person. Ideas are immaterial, you should be concerned more about people and less about ideas. My country suffered a lot because some people valued ideas more than other people. Believe me, I could detect ideological warriors by looking from Moon without optics, and you seems to me exactly like one of them.
> But that is so juvenile as to be completely ignored, and the appeal to rationalism principles from LessWrong in this example is just deeply absurd.
What are you trying to achieve making irrational claims to reject rational arguments? Do you really believe it would work? Do you think that if you call my arguments absurd I would abandon them? Or if you hint that my thoughts are juvenile then it would have no other way but to conform? Or if you accuse me of racism, when I didn't say nothing racist yet, it would change my position?
Try to reread our conversation, please. Try to find a place where I showed a support for Trump, or said something racist, fascist. You wouldn't find any. All I did is I rejected to do a ritual of two minute hate after hearing stimulus 'Trump'. I'm not a Pavlovian dog and not a Skinner's pigeon to react to a stimulus by a predictable way. Moreover I empathically reject to participate in a hate behavior, regardless of the chosen hate target. And no moral reasoning from your side would change it. And yeah, no demagogy, and even no rational arguments would change it, because my rejection to hate stems from my moral position.
It is not toxic to oppose wanton racism and fascism. If you are ashamed of opposing racism, then you are being toxic and you are enabling and sympathizing with racism. That’s on you.
You don’t get to just gainsay the opposition, claim it is “toxic” and then somehow have that treated like it’s on equal footing or deserves credibility in the same way that the original call outs of toxic racism or fascism themselves do.
You’re simply acting as part of the racist and fascist problem yourself at that point.
what computer technology and the internet (or for short: software) is doing to civilization is still at a very early stage. As I see this, the goal of "law" and the goal of "computer science" are quite similar.
As I see these kinds of articles (stratechery focuses on exactly this), is that we're witnessing the 'adjustments' in society brought about by the invention of software. I put all of this on a level comparable to the invention of writing and the subsequent 'rise' of rule of law.
having said this, the difficult thing to make sense of, and to explain to people with less software-experience is coming to understand what this article taps into in the section of "the global internet"; it's actually quite tricky to pin this down for me right now.
I'm referring to that aspect (or quality) of software that causes several executives to say this kinds of things:
>We have tried to get to what’s common, and the reality is it’s super hard on a global basis to design software that behaves differently in different countries. It is super difficult.
>If you’re a global technology business, most of the time, it is far more efficient and legally compliant to operate a global model than to have different practices and standards in different countries.
It's that thing sowftware does in which special cases worsen software complexity.
Software (and computing, and even industrial automation) are all about doing the same thing, no matter what. It's all about finding ways to avoid special cases; to avoid code repetition; and all that.
I'm sure that most people in Hacker News, due to our hands-on experience with software, are quite able to intuitively grasp this. But it's not so easy to explain and this 'quality of the digital' is (and will continue to) forcing contemporary capitalism to be re-evaluated (or something along these lines).
I'm an expert level skimmer and even I can't make sense of what this is about by simply skimming it. They taught me in highschool back in the day: make your point in an introduction, give supporting arguments in the body, conclude by repeating the point.
This seems to follow a 'trail of thought' style that just keeps going, as if it's a given that everyone's got 30 minutes to spare to find out if you're saying anything at all.
Trail of thought is fine for poetry and literature, this seems to attempt to make rational arguments? If so, the format's a disservice to that end.
I believe Collison's argument is that certain organizations affiliated with ex-President Trump should have been and were suspended from direct use of the Stripe API for "incitement to violence" in the time surrounding the certification of Electors by the U.S. Congress, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_St.... But other organizations that were allied in some way with Trump were still able to use the API. So in effect, the Trump-related organizations could use the API indirectly.
With that reasoning, shouldn't there also be organizations on the left in the United States, which is defined as the progressive / liberal / socialist part of the political spectrum, that should have received the same treatment during the period of the George Floyd Protests, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests?
I just want there to be a clear standard in most cases and rule enforcement to be reasonably consistent, in all aspects of life.
A couple things I've been learning more recently in order to have more productive political discussions:
- Set goals for political discussion. If it's just to learn, then you don't need to debate. If you're going to debate, set ground rules so cross-political friendships are not lost. (This has been more important to me, but there's certainly people who put their political leanings on their dating profile.)
- Don't make points about bad faith actors or that collectively acknowledge their existence. The left has them, the right has them, we've likely all been affected by them, but the majority of each party are just normal people championing their favorite political football team.
- Citing morals is pretty low brow. Morals differ in different geographies due to a myriad of influences. Topics that center around this are an impossible hill to climb.
- Don't state your party affiliation (or lack thereof). I learned in 2016 that being anything other than Republican or Democrat invites reductive conversation, or put more directly it invites people to 'other' you which changes the trajectory of the conversation.
- Always assume good faith. Most people don't act in bad faith, yet in political discussions it's easy to reach for that branch. People I've assumed this about I've usually discovered lived a very different life from me, so their perspectives and worldviews align to things that don't make sense at all.