Actually, the norm in the past many decades in the US was a very liberal press, where people could publish on subversive topics of all kinds. The "left" supported broad first amendment rights on practically any topic. Now, they actively seek to censor and silence those who question or criticize a narrative, and with regard to covid those who question government policy. It's a bizarre and disorienting shift.
It's really the present day that suggest that substack won't be able to stick to their guns out of fear of organized opposition from "mobs". If they're able to maintain dependence only on subscribers, it's possible they can survive (and hopefully thrive) -- until somebody gets greedy.
The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. Once that trust is broken I don't know how you rebuild it.
Hell people I commonly talk to still believe a police officer was beaten to death on 1/6 and that people, other then the women shot for trying to enter the chambers, died directly due to the riot. All because of that what the news reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it.
The most egregious of all is suppression of Lab Leak theory from the beginning. Emails between Collins and Fauci are absolutely chilling. Do yourself a favor and look up unredacted versions (Alina Chen’s Twitter) through FOIA requests. Holyshit was my reaction. The Lancet letter was also riddled with misinformation, suppression and conflicts of interest (Dr. Drazdak).
I actually believe in Institutions with a capital I and want them to succeed, build trust and help educate people of their reputation, historical significance and their importance in society. I’ve worked with NIST for many years - brilliant people doing good work.
But when they continue to lie to public, suppress facts, have a political agenda, and media is along with it, it’s becoming harder.
I still think CDC does good work. Just that the leadership needs to come out clean and apologize the public for being partisan.
> I still think CDC does good work. Just that the leadership needs to come out clean and apologize the public for being partisan.
Why are you saying "partisan" rather than "incompetent" ? It's surely convenient to blame the institutional incompetence on a strawman "other side", but the fact of the matter is that under administrations from both Parties they've repeatedly dropped the ball.
Distributing free rapid tests and finally recommending N95's after most everyone has stopped caring about pandemic is just icing on the cake. Biden's inauguration could have been a great time to break from the previous missteps, but the political narrative of "the pandemic is over thanks to vaccines" had to play instead. Which when you think about it is from the same exact vein of overly optimistic denial as "it'll be gone by Easter", just preached to a different choir.
It was partisanry. Francis Collins (NIH Director) and Fauci from NSAID were afraid of appearing to support Trump's rhetoric of China-virus. So they doubled down on supression of information and completely shutdown any discussion in the entire scientific community regarding Lab Leak origins.
They may have some details wrong, but do you think their overall impression of the event is wildly inaccurate? There was significant violence perpetrated during that event, even if it didn't result in death. Police officers were beaten. When these mistaken people are corrected and told no one died at the hands of rioters, but 150 police officers sustained injuries some so bad they were still out of work six months later, does their opinion significantly change?
> None are being charged with insurrection nor terrorism
Haven't 11 Oath Keepers been charged with "seditious conspiracy"[1]? Does that not come under the definition of "insurrection" - "a violent uprising against an authority or government"?
[1] "[If] two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States" via https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/par...
> Haven't 11 Oath Keepers been charged with "seditious conspiracy"[1]? Does that not come under the definition of "insurrection" - "a violent uprising against an authority or government"?
How many of these Oath Keeper individuals were directly led into this activity by FBI agents, CIs, "cutouts"/contractors, such as Ray Epps [1] and Stewart Rhodes[2]?
It appears that the recent charges of seditious conspiracy were in direct response to Darren Beattie's reporting of the coverup of Epps involvement, and Darren's drumbeat around Stewart Rhodes. This, after Darren uncovered FBI removing Ray Epps from the most-wanted list, hiding his name, and appearing to cover for their relationship with him during senate testimony.
> They may have some details wrong, but do you think their overall impression of the event is wildly inaccurate?
Jan 6th, BLM protests, and the pandemic are all Rorschach tests.
Unlike 9/11, the 1992 LA riots, and the Spanish Flu, the more recent events occupy a mushy middle ground of severity - a lot of people can go either way when deciding if they're the worst thing ever or just nuisances.
The ambiguity is causing people who feel strongly - in either direction - to lose their minds when they encounter dissenting or even just lackadaisically held positions on these events.
There is no "mushy middle ground" when it comes to a coupe attempt at the capitol building. Sorry but you are simply wrong about this. There is no ambiguity at all in that statement.
Maybe you disagree with the linked article and think it really was a coup attempt. Fine, my point is that sensible people can disagree on how serious the Jan six riots were. That doesn’t mean that the first group is trivialising them.
Note that, while I didn't personally consume any sources of news making these mistakes about this event and therefore can't reasonably comment on them, this specific wording is used extremely commonly as an uncharitable attack on those who are opposite to one's own political leanings. I.e. corrections are always described as "quiet" despite frequently being published in the same manner as the original material.
The article contradicts your claim "reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it". Firstly it is the first hit so hardly quiet. Secondly it outlines that initial reporting of Sicknick's death was simply reporting what capital police said, later revised by medical examiner. All front and center in this article.
I am just learning this. I thought all deaths were due to rioters and knew about Ashley's death when she was fatally shot. I read liberal media, all day, everyday - subscribed to WaPo and NYT.
Corrections get a tiny single digit fraction of the views of the original. There is no button to make sure everyone who saw the original sees the correction, assuming one is made.
All you need is a few other places making the same claim, sourced to NYT, and only the people that care enough will even click through to read the source. NYT isn't putting corrections on headline news for the same visibility as the nice fresh off the press article.
This largely has to do with the social media ecosystem in which these traditional companies find themselves, where social media is the primary vector for information access for the majority now (HN is an extreme outlier where people may actually read things beyond their "news" feed).
"quietly fixed" in that sense means "NYT reports one thing and it goes viral, corrects/updates/adds context later post-virality and, because it doesn't fit the existing narrative established by the initial viral story, most don't see it". Most people don't go back and check to see if a story they read 6 months ago has some new details that fundamentally change the impact of that story.
Whether NYT knows about this phenomenon, and (ahem "quietly") tunes their reporting to that phenomenon is a separate question.
Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in?
If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like?
Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like alot of IT focused disruption (including disruption I've worked on directly myself as an IT practioner), all they achieved was recreate the very thing they sought to disrupt, but poorly and generally worse version of it.
Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
>Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in?
I am absolutely blaming them for this shitshow, yes, if we're defining content overload as the self licking ice cream cone of viral news.
What happened here was a parallel evolution. On social media, whatever got the most eyeballs got the most clicks and thus the most ad revenue, and engineers tuned the algorithm to exploit this.
Traditional Media sees this, and strives to do the same but the difference is that they are (and now arguably were) speaking from a position of moral and institutional authority, and have since diluted their brand and standing with clickbait, stories that were published without proper vetting, getting things outright wrong etc etc. That's their own God damn fault. Nothing was stopping say NYT from developing their own Substack or a version of it.
>Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
Again, you post on HN. You're an extreme outlier with the self awareness to know that certain media consumption habits are unhealthy and likely divinate a worldview where a reality forms based simply on what's in your newsfeed and not any underlying truth.
> If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like?
I don't know if we can even consider the NYT a reliable source. After all, it was the NYT's fabulist Walter Duranty that covered for Stalin's forced starvation of 7 to 13 million people in former Soviet countries [1], and actively wrote for the benefit of communism, rather than the truth [2]. And, for his deception, received a Pulitzer Prize [3]
The linked article is from January 5 2022, a year less a day after the events in question, right? So it doesn't contradict a claim about the original reporting.
First article google search returns today != the first time NYT reported these things including clarifications as they became public which was months after the event around April 2021, and widely reported in detail by the press at that time.
In regards to the underlying events, and my motivation for commenting, it is splitting hairs. Media reported what was established at the time but none of it significantly changes the core history of what happened on Jan 6. The protest was violent with lots of assaults and injuries. This is now extensively documented, even with investigations still well in progress.
> The article contradicts your claim "reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it".
It doesn't contradict the initial claim since the article to which you linked is from a year later. What you would need to do is establish the historical chronology of newspaper articles that did not report police lies and then quietly correct the record days later. Otherwise your counterclaim is very weak.
> Media reported what was established at the time
News media do not report what is established at any time. What is established is by nature not news. The presence of claims in the media are then used to convince people of what information is established as true. By uncritically repeating lies news media has been fanning conflict since before the sinking of the Maine.
These are the lies they keep telling themselves. I had seen in several places that after more investigation the cop died of a heart attack,nevertheless it is almost certain he wouldn't have had that heart attack if that mob of traitors hadn't assaulted the capitol building, yet somehow they'll pick at a tiny detail and ignore the other 90% of the situation. It's maddening yet laughable at their feats of logic acrobatics.
> The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again.
These two things are huge. They are not monolithic entities that "lie" or "don't lie". I think a big problem is such blind cynicism. Especially when the alternatives people are turning to are hilariously worse. I'd be more sympathetic to the claim that traditional media is terrible if they weren't using that to direct influence towards crazy uncles on facebook instead.
I think many things people think are "lies" are just uncertainties. The pandemic is full of these. There are a ton of confounding variables and we don't have any perfect control groups from which to make any conclusions. Basically every big issue that gets debated by the internet armchair experts is badly affected by this: COVID severity, the effectiveness of vaccines, masks, Ivermectin. Every damn thread is full of people speaking as authoritatively as they possibly can pointing to individual studies or data points without understanding the context, scale, or confounding factors.
I see this distinction made all of the time when this topic comes up. The mainstream media is untrustworthy. Corporate media has an agenda. Legacy media is corrupt. These qualifiers all imply that there is some non-traditional, non-corporate, non-legacy media that does not have these problems. Yet whenever the people making these distinctions are asked who/what these superior alternatives are, the answers are always underwhelming, or outright laughable.
So who are these beacons of truth you allude by contrasting the "traditional" media?
If there is no pure alternative, then these problems are not unique to legacy/traditional/corporate/entrenched media, and therefore have nothing to do with them being in the mainstream.
Of course there isn't! That's why its so preposterous to single out "traditional" media as the sole purveyors of falsehoods. Meanwhile, this other segment of the media is essentially a broken clock of bottomless cynicism and grievance airing, which somehow bears no blame for the erosion of trust.
I guess there was too much trust in the MSM at one point and what we see now is a 2 fold problem:
1. A hangover after the blind trust period
2. A degradation of MSM became obvious and opened a way for smaller outlets and citizen journalists.
No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions. But you've really got your head up your own ass if you convince yourself that you are protecting people by deciding the information that is appropriate for them to be exposed to. I just don't understand the shortsightedness, the naivete, or the willingness to discard the principle of free speech.
Substack's incentives are even worse than YouTube or Facebook.
If you think YT and FB were good for western democracy, then I guess you can die on that hill.
Otherwise, die on the hill of "fuck those profiteers and the very specific capitalists very much among us right now in this exact setting that enable them, who should probably know better by now"
There is a difference between fighting censorship and supporting a platform of the day. So fight censorship, don't support substack, YT, FB or anything else.
On the side note: having many competing platforms help to fight censorship. So if you are serious about that I don't see how you can't support and promote diversity. Any road will start with the first steps anyway and having 5,10,50 platforms is better than having 3 platforms and seems like a good first step.
> No doubt, these censors and would-be censors have the best of intentions.
I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets.
Capitalism is a symptom of power and information asymmetries. A few years ago, Zuckerberg said that all problems would be solved if everybody told the truth all the time. It's not that simple though. There's a Greg Egan story about a couple that undergoes a procedure to experience all the thoughts and feelings of each other for a period of time, which ultimately results in their breakup.
I think this is absolutely right, and wish that discussions on this topic would focus more on the externalities of profit-seeking platforms than free speech principles.
Free speech absolutists tend to jump to the defense of free speech and in the process ignore a real problem. Pro-censorship/content moderation folks tend to jump to the defense of censorship/moderation. In the process, the debate gets framed around "speech vs. censorship" instead of the serious issues with our political commons being dominated by sophisticated profit-seeking entities.
>"I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets."
Profit is definitely one motivation for censorship, but there has been plenty of censorship in non-profit-centric situations. Communist countries and other government actors have been leaders in censorship, with no obvious profit motive.
OP is clearly referring to censorship in the "admin bans you from their website if you say things they don't like" sense, not the "government throws you in jail if you say wrong thing" sense. These conversations tend to become unproductive and devolve when folks conflate these two senses of the word censorship.
IMO, we should use "content moderation" for the former and "censorship" for the latter, congruent with historical usage. But people who are against content moderation will claim I'm being biased, even though I view the whole debate as a bit of red herring that distracts from the real issues. So I'd settle for "private-sector censorship" and "government censorship".
But in any case it's almost always counter-productive to conflate the two, to the point that it's a logical fallacy which should be named.
It makes misunderstandings more likely, however i am not so sure if the distinction still exists when every conversation online is covered by private-sector censorship. Seeing as in the end the private sector always has governments influencing their moderation policy. And be it just through liability.
My point was more abut misunderstandings, which is why at the end I say "whatever, as long as we're all on the same page, others can pick the names."
> i am not so sure if the distinction still exists when every conversation online is covered by private-sector censorship
That's certainly fair, and I think a particularly prescient observation in favor of the conclusion that it's time to severely restrict legal protections for social media platforms.
> will claim I'm being biased, even though I view the whole debate as a bit of red herring that distracts from the real issues
This implies you don't think "content moderation" is a "real" problem, which suggests to me you are biased. Also, "moderation" to me suggests mere moderation (consistent with fair, stated guideline) versus moderation "if you say things they don't like".
This kind of fight happens all over the place (e.g. what counts as hate/rape/murder etc), but I feel "moderation" is fairly neutral sounding without the implication of injustice befitting the act of being deprived of a a voice on omnipresent and monopolising platforms. It's also clear to me that some publications use comments sections as a way to manipulate public opinion, so cherry-picking/censoring them is an exercise in PR if (and only if) it isn't clear that result are being manipulated.
The argument I sometimes see is that censorship is justified to prevent indirect harm of misinformation. If you want to be unvaccinated, that is your choice, but posting anti-vax content may have externalities , such as convincing other ppl to not be vaxed.
> posting anti-vax content may have externalities , such as convincing other ppl to not be vaxed.
Oh erudite student of history, what then will stop the toxic vaccines and unethical medical studies from being halted then?
Such as:
The Cutter Incident [1] , The SV40 Contamination [2] , The Swine Flu Vaccine Debacle [3], The Vaccine Contamination disaster [4] , The Tuskegee Syphilis Study [5] , just to name a few.
We should be skeptical about the pros and cons of medical interventions, and also, non-interventions too.
Well there’s been an astronomical number of breakthrough cases on the vaccine so maybe the problem is people like you talking in such a definitive terms over something that is clearly not 100% effective
Can you site claims of 100% effectiveness? Did they come from medical authorities?
As far as I'm aware, even early on in the cycle, realistic claims of effectiveness were being made, with some quibbling over data transparency that were resolved.
As we now have variants to contend with, that effectiveness in preventing infection has dropped precipitously. However the effectiveness at preventing hospitalisation and death is still pretty high.
If it was sold to you as 100% effective you were lied to. But if you were told that there were claims of 100% effectiveness which were clearly a lie, by someone trying to put you off vaccination, then you've been given false information there too.
The general assumption at first was that vaccinated people couldn't spread the virus which turned out to be false. We still vilify the unvaccinated when both are susceptible to transmission.
>> We still vilify the unvaccinated when both are susceptible to transmission.
They are still more likely to be infectious for longer, they are still more likely to clog up the hospital system, occupy ICU beds, and indirectly harm others who would usually be able to be treated but now can't.
Except that it works. In fact it works for a population of 5 times our size (China). So it seems to me that the only people who have their heads up their asses are us, who seem to think that censorship is a childs model for maintaining power and influence. In our technological society censorship can work better than ever before.
Frankly, imo, in the absence of effective accountability for ones' words or deeds, censorship becomes one of the only few remaining tools for stability.
I think it's far too early to pass judgment on whether it works in China. Lots of very oppressive states have lasted for decades, apparently successfully, until they implode spectacularly.
Less than a century ago, many in the West sang the praises of communism as (unkown to them) a million people died in the Gulag. Things aren't always as they appear.
Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently conveys, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. The idea of preference falsification was put forth by the social scientist Timur Kuran in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies as part of his theory of how people's stated preferences are responsive to social influences. It laid the foundation for his theory of why unanticipated revolutions can occur. The concept is related to ideas of social proof as well as choice blindness.
It is a child's model. Look at how it is used by the ruling party. As a child with their toys. Look at the childish displays of outrage when we tell them you can't sexually abuse (and then disappear) your tennis players without consequences. Who even does that? "Oh, that toy said something mean to me so I threw it away." Adults don't do that, children do.
When we condemn slave labor it's more childish tantrums. That's what wolf warrior diplomacy is really.
It's a state of more than a billion under its care yet on the political stage it's a huge Akira-sized baby with a big toy baton smash-smash-smashing any who dare discipline it.
The status quo is a messy conflagration where initial beliefs were the brush, a combination of mental health issues and social frustration were the trees, and the perverse incentives of engagement metrics provided the high winds.
So I'm in the awkward middle ground of believing it's counter-productive to try to shelter people from ideas but also believing that lots of people are very easy to manipulate, even so easy to manipulate that it can happen en masse and entirely by accident.
(I'm not arguing against the argument against censorship... it's just that I think the censorship issue is mostly a massive red herring when it comes to the issues that are discussed in the article.)
> So I'm in the awkward middle ground of believing it's counter-productive to try to shelter people from ideas but also believing that lots of people are very easy to manipulate, even so easy to manipulate that it can happen en masse and entirely by accident.
Don't think it is an accident. The ruling class has set this stage by design. There is little to no critical thinking being taught in K-12. Create a malleable population, then push censorship to protect them from themselves.
It’s why I was so unconcerned with the school shutdowns early in the pandemic. Even an entire semester lost wouldn’t noticeably impede the nonexistent learning of US students. However, now that’s it’s been two years of on and off online school, that’s well past the point when detrimental effects would show, even in the US education system.
You can't teach critical thinking. There are techniques you can learn, but critical thinking is fundamentally an attitude. It's the attitude of never taking anything you read or hear at face value.
And while it can be quite important, it's also super exhausting. I think people's tolerance for that kind of work exists along a spectrum (probably with at least some biological component) but that no one can really do it all the time.
You can teach the principles, and example of why it's important to create motivation.
any subject requires a motivated attitude to succeed. Critical thinking also requires an attitude to value the topic IRL - but arguable that ought to be the case for all topics.
> It's the attitude of never taking anything you read or hear at face value.
A class in philosophy (or history) of science will teach you all the ways in which people where wrong before the process was established, and will make you see the value of science. CT is the same thing applied to everything, not just formal physical studies.
> it's also super exhausting
Only because most things are written to manipulate. If publications actually suffered for their reputation b/c of poor articles the whole thing would be easier. Also, if journalists set out to prove their claims, and properly source them - arguably something like Wikipedia is a group effort to do what is hard for the individual (I think it fails, btw, by leaning too much on published material).
“Never taking anything you read or hear at face value” makes it impossible to operate in a functioning society. This is particularly the case in a society where some people are happy to fill your information channels with conflicting information. Even if you do your research and reject some of the bad data, the effort will paralyze you (and others like you) which is almost as good from a malicious perspective.
Or to think about it from an information security perspective, once you adopt a specific defense mechanism, someone will look for ways to exploit it. This one is particularly easy to exploit.
Did we ever have a less malleable population? Was critical thinking ever taught? If this is by design, I'd argue the design was there since the dawn of civilization. (Note: no I'm not offering any solution, just making an observation)
The silver lining of this awkward middle ground is the certainty that censorship is the wrong way to go. We may be doomed if people remain so easy to manipulate, but if you really believe that censorship is counter-productive, then education is the only path out.
And I guess to expand on my position, I don't think this debate is stupid. The way through, in my mind, as naive as it may seem, is to be basically like substack, and acknowledge that providing a platform is a big responsibility, one they don't take lightly, that the goal is increased trust overall, and that that goal is primarily served by being as content agnostic as possible. Acting in good faith with no expectation that people will return the favor is the way to build trust.
We’ll also be doomed if this is just a trial run that just enables authoritarianism in another decade. If people roll over on this now, the government won’t care to subdue the populace more & more in the future.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
One thought experiment that has helped me get my mind around the problem is "why is it necessary that parents shield children from some information?"
I think free speech might have a context that is invisible to us. Something like a prior, or trained neural net, in which free speech and no censorship is absolutely the right thing. And then there might be other contexts where it is wrong, and harmful.
In other words, "dangerous ideas" may be the wrong way of thinking about free speech--it might be "dangerous contexts" of our minds--such as childhood. If so, what then?
There is a difference between a child and an adult. We make that distinction for a reason, and we act differently for a reason.
A great analogy is to think of an eggshell with a chick inside. The eggshell provides protection for a long time but is also restrictive. When the chick is strong enough it will break free. But if it breaks free too early it won’t be strong enough to survive in the world.
Do you actually need studies? Adults for the most part are more educated, children are not. Therefore it’s easier to tell a child a lie than an adult. You can use basic logic.
I like your analogy, as I appreciate thinking about it. Some thoughts:
Breaking an eggshell requires effort, and seems kind of like a "test" to me. But in most human societies, it's possible to simply let time pass and you will reach the "age of majority" (usually 18 or 19 years old). I wonder if we're doing a disservice by allowing children to cross that boundary without any "eggshell test".
>One thought experiment that has helped me get my mind around the problem is "why is it necessary that parents shield children from some information?"
I'd argue that paternalism is particularly justified in relationships that are literally paternalistic.
The issue is that the justification for my neighbor paternalistically dictating how I should live my life is much weaker a parent dictating to their child. We shouldn't deeply have to delve into why this is the case.
But if we let people decide for themselves, they might decide wrong! And our position is clearly and obviously right! But people are stupid and will listen to lies, so we have to remove the possibility of them being exposed to those lies!
/s, in case it wasn't obvious...
People are more certain of their own position than is warranted. This is true in politics (as C. S. Lewis said, in practice no policy can be more than probably correct). It was true with Covid ("trust the science" when not enough science had been done yet; people talked as if the correct course was obvious and certain, and they were often wrong in hindsight). And it will be true again, and again, and again.
And from that false certainty, people regard contrary opinions/interpretations of the data as not just false, but morally wrong. And then they regard people believing the "obviously wrong" position as a sign that people are stupid and not to be trusted with the facts. (Unlike themselves, of course, who clearly can be trusted with the facts, because they reached the right answers!)
And people don't see the dichotomy between "people are stupid and evil, and can't be trusted with the truth" and "we (who are also people!) can decide what is true, and can be trusted to only tell them the truth". When you point a finger at someone, four finger point back at you...
The issue with that approach to me is you end up saying every piece of information is as valid as any other.
We know some things are wrong, we have evidence that they're wrong, and believing in some of those things can cause people to take actions which endanger and even kill others.
So what do you do? I'm not advocating censorship as a solution, but simply throwing up your hands and saying "who are you to judge?" isn't really working either.
> We know some things are wrong, we have evidence that they're wrong, and believing in some of those things can cause people to take actions which endanger and even kill others.
It depends on the specific issue. But since we agreed we didn’t want censorship, we err on the side of caution present our evidence with hopefully better and more thorough research supporting it.
And when that doesn’t work because either political or profit-driven mudslingers undermine it at every turn?
Again, please don’t interpret this as “we need censorship”, that’s not what I’m getting at.
The notional “marketplace of ideas” is clearly not functioning in the presence of a lot of people who are not interested in whether their ideas stand up or not, and a whole boatload of motivated mudslingers. I don’t know a good answer, but “present your arguments better and hope” doesn’t seem to be one.
>We know some things are wrong, we have evidence that they're wrong, and believing in some of those things can cause people to take actions which endanger and even kill others.
That concerns you as well. Thats the whole issue. There is no "reasonable default" to fall back on. That you have identified some rather obnoxious idiots doesnt mean you are suddenly smart enough to tell the rest of the world what to do. Especially since chances are you have fallen for sock puppets aimed at creating a reaction in you to get you to accept and call for authoritarian solutions.
Authoritarian solutions dont work. Just wanting them to work doesnt work, a short look into history shows that. Reality in the end is really complex. Too complex to just force other people around no matter how smart somebody feels on the topic. Because thats how stupid people always think of themselves, "smart enough" to understand the implications of forced actions just this one time.
edit: All of this not to mention that it always create a reaction in people. Which leaves us with conflict on topics we should be able to find a consensus.
By your logic, we should never try to establish facts and "I didn't do it" should always be a valid defence for murder, as reality is really complex and making a determination of truth or facts is impossible. What's more in decreeing one version of events to be factual, and imposing a prison sentence on someone for 'murder', the state is acting as an authoritatiran arbiter of reality.
Just to add - I specifically said I didn't advocate censorship, and asked what actions might be taken. Do you have any ideas in that direction? Or is the idea of taking any action, however small (for instance better education in evaluating information) offensive to you in an axiomatic way?
I agreed with you, i am just pointing out that you missed a perspective. When you say that the problems is idiots that would just need to be told what to do its a fetching argument. The problem is to identify actual smart people to do the telling. Being smart would entails understanding not just the facts but the consequences of actions. If you would understand them, and could communicate them, you wouldnt need to force people. If you need to force people chances are very good you are just overlooking a perspective that they see and you dont. Which doesnt make them right or smart, but a working solution never the less likely requires all the perspectives.
Which means you understood the problem but missunderstood that that stupid person might be you. Thats why that doesnt work. Seeing as nobody thinks they are the stupid one. Figuring that out is the hard part and it doesnt seem to be solvable through force to me. Force doesnt select for stupidity but for power. Which just means chances are high you end up giving power to stupid people since they are more willing to boss others around.
Differently put, you are looking for somebody smart to fix the situation for you. I looked around and there dont seem to be any to spare so we will have to do with us idiots. And once idiots start forcing other idiots around, those idiots push back. Which leaves us with a lot of pushing and pulling in a worse situation all together.
>Do you have any ideas in that direction?
Most idiots seem to mean well so lets see if we cant agree on a consensus about the state of reality and our criteria for acceptable solutions till some smart aliens show up to run this shitshow for us. We wont find a solution for everything but i am confident we could get really far by just agreeing on a reasonable minimum.
I think the problem stems from the lofty goal of finding actual solutions that arent horrible and applicable everywhere. Which we dont have now. Best we can do is look at existing solutions for specific problems and see if we cant agree on improvements. Being motivated by understanding the cost and risk of authoritarian solutions. Which we can communicate. Which just requires a willingness to communicate which goes out of the window once you create a conflict.
tldr: Trying to dictate what people think was tried and failed multiple times before. Its a really really bad idea. Wanting it to work doesnt change that, since you can explain why it fails reliably. Its the same reason that makes the idea so tempting in the first place.
I think we must be talking at cross purposes, I didn't say anything about "stupid people", or forcing people to have any particular viewpoint.
You seem to be lost in a sea of relative opinion, and of all viewpoints being equally valid/stupid. That's far from always the case.
Again, by this logic, we should never address crime because by it's very nature a court case is trying to establish what are or are not real facts about a case in the face of conflicting opinion. Are we too stupid to have courts?
If not, then we're not too stupid to evaluate reality. That doesn't mean censorship. I'm not advocating censorship. I just don't think we're on such a foundation of sand as your comments assert.
Edit: I am rate limited so can’t respond below, but I wanted to say in response - I disagree that we don’t have the ability to say some things are counterfactual, and I also disagree that admitting this implies censorship or other authoritarian action is either good or necessary. I further disagree that communication is sufficient on its own when propagation of counterfactual information costs lives. Is there another solution? I don’t know, but I do think better education has to form part of it.
Does scientific knowledge “dictate facts”? It tells us some things are wrong, while leaving open the possibility of further learning.
Thats what censorship boils down to and why it doesnt work. The answer to your initial question is being able to communicate why something doesnt work. Which apparently i am to stupid to in this case. But thats a stupidity people can work on, while censorship has fundamental issues.
edit: was an answer to the first sentence before the edit
To the rest, the problem is finding a basis solid enough for authoritarian action on such a delicate problem as speech (which requires another level then say a court case). Its not either quicksand or a rock but a minimum required level on the spectrum. If you dictate facts, you are dictating that this description encompasses all perspectives and every additional one is wrong. More then that, you dictate that those are all the implications. Its claiming you reached the end of knowledge.
You either can convince people that you are talking about facts or you cant. The problem is communication and not lack of force. As the issue here is only solvable with the former without accepting an inevitable crash in the future. You bringing up censorship is counterproductive for this reason. Somebody (not necessarily me) being able to explain that should be an example for an alternative.
It's an interesting exploration of the problems with fact checkers and weaponised use of 'facts' in online discourse.
It's also pretty much exactly what I was talking about when I said I was not talking about censorship, which you repeatedly ignored in the above discussion.
There are other avenues to explore here, in which we can look at whether information is correct and put it in context, than just heavy handed government action or merely better presentation of one side of an argument.
I have a slightly different opinion from /u/
cf141q5325's. I think the problem isn't stupidity, it's hunger for power.
When you grant someone the authority to decide what other people should do, you can optimize for intelligence all you like, but the ones who will actually _struggle_ to get that position are the ones who want to be able to tell other people what to do.
Separation of powers is a partial remedy to this. You can either make the rules, or enforce the rules, but not both. (Democracy is another remedy, also partial.) We _can_ have courts because becoming a judge isn't quite as attractive as becoming a dictator.
A gigantic issue with the current 'fight against misinformation' is that it features no separation at all. When it comes from the government, it's typically designed, evaluated, and enforced by the executive branch alone. And when it comes from private entities, it's completely arbitrary and tyrannical according to whatever mood the CEO wakes up in that morning.
The is no single default but there are entire hosts of different defaults that will work across different communities and some norms that ought to exist across all communities. Hacker News wont let me abuse you verbally and if I make a credible threats of violence against you most places OUGHT to lock me up in order to prevent you from being murdered. Turns out there are TONS of reasonable defaults, some of which we can arrive at by simple logic others which we can arrive at by trial and error.
It would be shocking if communication was literally the only area of human endeavor which couldn't or shouldn't be regulated. Stranger yet to pose the idea on a moderated forum. Turns out authoritarian solutions do work.
All of which have implications independent of the motivation. Implications which are really intransparent. Which might very well have more downsides then the initial problem, even before you look at the reaction you create.
Regulating communication is one of the most dangerous kinds of regulation, as it regulates what people think. And once you limit on your ability to think its very likely that you are about to crash into something, seeing as stupidity boils down to being unaware of another perspective. Its akin to blindfolding drivers of cars so they dont get distracted to reduce crashs.
Exactly this. When it comes to your health, you are what you eat. Why do people think their brains are completely unaffected by their training set? You think what you read/hear.
We're just meat computers, and information hygiene (or the lack thereof) actually matters and has a big impact.
Lovely, and who gets to determine which information is "hygienic"?
I don't think it's a coincidence that people who support censorship think of humans as "meat computers". I suggest that if someone says "we are meat computers," we start treating them like one, i.e. ignoring them.
Even if you don't understand their motivations, nearly everyone believes that they're doing the right thing. As I've internalized that, it becomes a lot easier to empathize with people who have different viewpoints: instead of being a bunch of cackling fascists, maybe they are just well-intentioned people with different values than I hold (or perhaps even the same values, just weighted differently)
There is something miserable in the figure who enjoyed in their youth the freedom of speech, but from the comfort of age seeks to deny it to others; some deformity of the soul. -Edward Snowden
Imagine you have free speech. Yay! Now what? Why was this so important again?
Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose. In the relationship between a powerful government and a collection of individually vulnerable citizens, it pushes the power balance farther toward the individual.
Is the goal to give all the power to the individual? No, that's not the goal. The goal is to have some sort of equilibrium between the powers of the government and the powers of individuals. The point of equilibrium is fuzzy and ill-defined, but it's characterized by an increase in stability.
The point is that free speech is not a sacred irreducible holy thing. It's an important thing that serves a purpose. It's not absolute. It's possible for something in a given situation to be more important than free speech.
>Is the goal to give all the power to the individual? No, that's not the goal. The goal is to have some sort of equilibrium between the powers of the government and the powers of individuals.
The government is "individuals"! Every bit of power you take from the individuals in society, you give to the individuals in government. And historically the vast majority of these people have been corrupt and self-serving, because such kinds of people are attracted to positions of power, and most voters can't tell the difference between a good person and a skilled liar. Government attracts narcissists, as it requires a certain kind of narcisissm to go about telling people that they should live their lives how you want, not how they want.
I really appreciated reading your post. So much of what I read online and then come to even believe myself pushes me towards one extreme or the other. I almost argue I need to do A or B. Again and again, something nudges me back to realizing it's a balance, an oscillation between the two sides, never fully settled, always with a little bounce and overshooting.
Reading your post helped me feel calm and at ease, nudging me back towards this realization. So thank you.
Free speech by our definition in the US is a sacred and mostly irreducible "holy" thing, as being the very first amendment of the constitution. There is no true democracy without free speech. Free speech is a fundamental atom of a healthy and fair democracy. There is almost never a case where restriction of speech isn't abused to give one individual or group political advantage over another.
It is not atomic and irreducible, even in the United States. How could it be atomic and irreducible if there were exceptions to it? What justifies the exceptions? [1] Please don't be afraid to dig just a little bit deeper. I promise you that your respect for free speech will not be diminished: you'll just be a little bit less wrong in your logic.
So, it's not, it's just the first change to an already existing document. The first article of your constitution describes the legislatives institutions. I (vaguely) know that, I'm not even American.
It is precisely because it is the first amendment in the bill of rights, that demonstrates how highly the value is held. Any other "change" could have been first, but freedom of speech was chosen. The founders were not going to otherwise ratify the constitution without the bill of rights. I find it a bit pointless to say you are not American and vaguely know something in order to demonstrate that you understand the constitution better despite not being so, if you vaguely don't know that the constitution was not ratified without the bill of rights.
Some states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut) ratified the Constitution before the Bill of Rights was formally drafted[1] and initially without requiring the Bill of Rights. The Massachusetts Compromise was an agreement that the Bill of Rights would be packaged with the new Constitution (with the BoR being active at ratification, before the Constitution) and was required before some of the remaining states would ratify the Constitution.
It's worth pointing out that the Bill of Rights was ratified 2.0 years after the first elections for national office and 1.5 years after the constitution was finally ratified. [1]
There are numerous legal restrictions on speech, including against false advertising and slander. Further, free speech has not been considered "holy" in private spaces for the history of the US. This modern discussion of social media and moderation is completely novel and cannot draw from past feelings on free speech as a principle.
Yes. I feel like too many people are making the argument that social media spaces are the "town square" (legal concept) despite the fact that it has never been established. It's much closer to individuals sending in their opinions to a newspaper in hops of being printed in the OpEd section.
After that one gets into philosophical ethics rather quickly. In practice people not having human rights degrades into much suffering quickly. You said something not-so-nice about the government? Now we throw you in jail! So, why is that wrong? I am sure one can talk pretty endlessly in a philosophy course but in practice there does not seem to be much point. Also, we should keep history in mind. In fact, there is reason for severe trauma surrounding this area. Horrible events in history like nazism and communism, both with a body count in the 100 millions are a reason to hold some principles sacred to the point of refusing to discuss them.
I may not have all the answers, but personally, I think the question is rather important. I am really uncomfortable with the idea of certain things being sacred for no reason. Sometimes I get the impression that a lot of people are fighting for the right things, but by accident. My worry is that I don’t know what then prevents people from fighting for the wrong things by similar accident (eg.: nazism).
Another thing one might ask is what is the goal of having a society in the first place or what should be the goal of having a society. I would say that providing its members with their human rights is pretty high up there as the goal. But maybe we can do a bit better. What about every person being able to strive for what they themselves consider valuable? I think that as such already presupposes human rights. Another thing to think about in this context is economic prosperity. When talking about nazism, I don't think you can see this as separate from the economic situation at the time it came up. If there is enough economic hardship people will follow the great leader who promises better and they will be vulnerable to the suggestion that some outgroup or etnicity is harming them.
Let me ask the question differently: Who would protect human rights?
Extrapolating from your examples it seems that only democracies (and the hypothetical benevolent dictator) grant individuals human rights. The question is: What comes first, democracy or human rights?
Human rights are a precondition to democracy. The key idea is that in a democracy people can get laws changed if they can get enough others behind the idea. To do this one needs, at the very least, to tell other people about this idea that one has about this law that needs to be changed. If such speech is prohibited then democracy stops at square one. Your hypothetical benevolent dictator already points in this direction. A benevolent dictator could in principle respect all human rights but he would still write all laws so it would not be a democracy. It could even be allowed to say that the dictator situation sucks but it would just be impossible to change. So human rights precede democracy logically speaking, but perhaps not practically speaking.
I saw a video in which Richard Feynman was asked to explain why magnets repel. He went on a long tirade but finally the answer was "magnets repel, because they do". Asking for a deeper explanation does not make sense unless you want to study theoretical physics for the rest of your life.
I feel this question about human rights falls into a similar category. They are required. If you want to go deeper into the reasons, you need to spend a lifetime studying philosophy and ethics and whatnot.
Why are they required and what are they required for? Countries exist that don't have the exact same human rights, so clearly those rights don't need to exist for a nation or an individual to successfully exist.
Did you not read the post? The answer as to why is a very deep discussion. Sure North Korea exists, do you want to live there? Maybe start with personal feelings?
"The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists and is the only true god. The evidence exists but you have to already be an expert to understand it and it would take too long to explain it to you." This a tactic to shut down the discussion, not advance it.
Any time someone invokes "human rights" or "natural rights", it's worth at least referencing a common basis of facts written somewhere. Without this, such discussion is likely to follow two diverging paths and the people discussing it likely aren't talking about the same concepts. The relevant Human Rights document is usually the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1] and Free Speech/Expression is Article 19.
Some people sat down and decided the list of things that are "human rights". Lots of other people object to some of the items on that list, so it's not exactly infallible.
North Korea is a good example of a place with the lack of 1A protected speech from government interference, but it also has lots of other "human rights" violations, so you aren't really clarifying the problem with free speech by using it as an example. North Korea frequently violates most of the 30 UN declared human rights articles, so the connotation of using that country as an example leads to conflation of other issues.
Everything that creates or improves "personal feelings" isn't a human right, so that doesn't help the discussion much either.
You just said a whole lot of nothing trying to demand people subscribe to the ideas of human rights of a particular country. Human rights are universal, by definition.
But they aren't universal in the sense that all people and governments agree on the list and definitions.
In particular to the Freedom of Speech discussion, the most important part is the list of exemptions. Even China would argue they give their people Freedom of Speech, but they have more restrictions/exemptions than other countries. Hence, they are not universal in a practical sense and the details must be discussed.
"Because they do" is really vague, but a more useful way of saying the same thing is "repulsion is an observed property of some physical objects due to the force of magnetism" is a better answer. Feynman was creative and coy with some of his answers. That doesn't mean we all have to be.
The "Human Rights" discussion is different from a law of physics. It is a human-curated list of rights and they all have restrictions and exclusions, which is core to the "censorship by private companies on their properties" discussion.
It's helpful to discussions of "Human Rights" or "Natural Rights" to point to a written document that disambigautes the terms and enumerates the specific rights, so we know we are discussing the same thing.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 says
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.[1]
You say free speech is a tool that serves a purpose. Then you imply that the purpose of the tool is to push the balance of power toward the individual. The goal in pushing the balance of power to the individual is to have an equilibrium between the individuals' and the government's power. This equilibrium is characterized by an increase in stability. It seems fair to summarize this as "free speech is a tool that serves the purpose of increasing stability".
You conclude: "It's possible for something in a given situation to be more important than free speech." I think it's implied here that this "something" is (an increase in) stability. If stability is more important than free speech, it implies free speech should be restricted in order to achieve stability. In other words, censorship should be applied in order to achieve more stability.
The “something” in question was not referring to the increase in stability, though it might lead to it. Also, and most crucially, I did not say, or intend to suggest, that “censorship improves stability”.
Free speech and stability are not in competition with each other. They’re different categories of things.
Please help me out a little and try really hard to not interpret what I said in the worst possible way.
Well, you said one of the things that could be more important than free speech is stability. You did not directly say "censorship improves stability", but if you say that stability is one of the things that can be more important than free speech, it strongly implies free speech can sometimes be restricted (i.e. censorship) to reach the goal of stability.
I don't feel like I'm interpreting your posts in a particularly negative way. I'm just trying to be explicit about the kind of tradeoff you're proposing. If you find yourself flipping your stance once the flowery rhetoric is translated into basic, actionable language, someone is getting fooled and it's not me.
1. Do you, or do you not, think that there can be something which is more important than free speech and which leads (among other things) to increased stability?
2. Do you, or do you not, think that if this something is more important than free speech, the consequence of this is that free speech can be restricted for this thing?
1.) yes, and I will give as an example “human life”. I believe killing someone is morally worse, and in many situations more detrimental to social stability (although I wouldn’t be sure how to measure that), than depriving someone of their right to free speech.
You are making a false equivalence here: Restriction of free speech != censorship.
Every single Western democracy on this planet restricts free speech in exactly the way parent described - as a trade-off between the rights of the individuals and the rights of the souvereign [1]. Even the US has a long list of restrictions to free speech.
The question is not whether to restrict free speech, the question is where to draw the line.
I think we are in complete agreement, but for some reason you want to avoid using the word "censorship" in the case of a restriction of speech that you agree with (a restriction you agree with). Sure, free speech has limits. Beyond those limits, censorship is applied. At this point it's just an argument over the definition of words, not very interesting.
Yes and no. Words do matter. Censorship usually (also) refers to restrictions of free speech typical for non-democratic societies [1], which doesn't lead to productive discussions (in my experience). It is not uncommon to see the false conclusion "censorship is used in authoritarian countries therefore free speech must not be restricted".
> a restriction of speech that you agree with
It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree. It matters whether we, as a society, can find a balance between the rights of the individuals and the rights of the sovereign/state.
>It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree. It matters whether we, as a society, can find a balance between the rights of the individuals and the rights of the sovereign/state.
Yes. And this is called... censorship. Even when we, the good guys, do it. You can't just change the definition of words based on whether a western democracy or an authoritarian hellhole does it, when they're doing exactly the same thing.
Edit:
> Censorship usually (also) refers to restrictions of free speech typical for non-democratic societies [1], which doesn't lead to productive discussions (in my experience). It is not uncommon to see the false conclusion "censorship is used in authoritarian countries therefore free speech must not be restricted".
If people make a faulty argument, point out the fault in the argument. No need to change the definition of words so the ground shifts under their feet. FWIW, I think "censorship is a prime feature of authoritarian governments" is a perfectly valid argument against, ahem, restricting free speech.
Not sure where I changed the definition of censorship - I was saying that using the word censorship can easily lead to false equivalences, such as
> they're doing exactly the same thing.
No, they aren't, baseline and context matters. You are falsely equating the removal of say, anti-vax conspiracy content in the US, with the removal of say, political/homosexual/religious/ethnic content in an authoritarian regime. If you don't believe me, ask somebody who was forced to flee their country due to any of the above reasons.
> point out the fault in the argument.
Let's assume 'censorship' == any restriction to free speech. We already agreed that every Western democracy has such restrictions or 'censorship'. How can "authoritarian regimes use 'censorship'" now be an argument against 'censorship'?
To paraphrase (not a perfect analogy), murderers use knives, and chefs use knives, but "murderers use knives" is not valid argument against knives?
I understand if you disagree with already existing restrictions of free speech in Western democracies, is that what you mean?
I'm not passing a value judgment on how western democracies restrict speech, I'm just saying that if they restrict speech, then they are doing censorship. Indeed they are doing the same thing, qualitatively, as more authoritarian countries, but on different subjects and with different intensities. If it makes you uncomfortable to call it what it is, perhaps you'd do well to investigate why that is.
You're making a false assertion that attaching consequences to some speech is censorship. No one can prevent you from yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. There are however post hoc consequences for doing so falsely, as doing so is very dangerous to others.
Even then you have the opportunity to defend yourself in a court of law. You may have been thought there was a fire in the theater but simply been mistaken. That's why laws include clauses of intent.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech.
This is a very utilitarian point of view. I cannot say that I disagree hard, but free speech is more than just a tool.
It is part of human dignity, at least for some people: not to be muzzled by somebody else on the account that (s)he is of a) nobler birth, b) dominant religion, gender or race, c) physically stronger, d) elected to decorate some office etc.
This is an intangible, but very important human asset. So many people live in countries where they would like to walk free and criticize what they do not like, but must cast down their eyes in fear of every uniform. The feeling of liberation when such a regime falls down is indescribable.
I saw the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution unfolding. It wasn't just a technical adjustment; for the first time in years people could (verbally or literally) spit on their former tyrants and walk free.
I fully agree that the utilitarian dimension is probably not the full picture. I really just find it a useful (ha!) idea, and I hope it’s given someone some difficult questions to think about. shrug
Free speech is never unconditional free speech. The reality is more along the lines “allowed speech = everything except set X” construct, where X tends to grow indefinitely as more and more unacceptable things come in focus.
As an example, in both Czech Republic and Slovakia denying Holocaust is a crime. I’m sure new examples will come in future, though I hope we will not have to endure another mass horror and/or loss of life for that.
So, how about as a thought experiment we invert the aforementioned construct “allowed = everything except set X” and think of it as “allowed = one giant set Y”. Looks like we believe we must allow only certain things for humanity to exist and progress—so what is the criteria shared by speech in set Y? Random idea; what if it has less to do with what is said but the intent of it? However, the intent can never be communicated perfectly or proven, so it doesn’t seem feasible to restrict based on it, and we have to resort to substance banning instead.
Another thought, if we eliminate all mental issues and insecurities that cause people to attack (and agitate others to join) a group or generally behave in a way that is detrimental to others for personal gain, would we still need to restrict freedom of speech? Or is that an unrealistic scenario generally?
I disagree that it is a tool. A silenced individual becomes a slave at some point. Not the individual challenges government power, other state institutions do that, so there is no compromise needed at all. Many people believe those control mechanisms are failing as they get more and more politicized. It is normal by now that government breaks the law. It is not allowed to put people under surveillance. Yet it does constantly. People responsible for that should be in prison. For a very long time. The problem would be solved since the next one would think hard of repeating the mistake. Yet many states are dysfunctional here.
So people are wise to insist on their right to make live hard for government. Until it repents this will not change.
I rank free speech very highly, certainly more than just a tool. My reasoning is this:
1. Some things are good in themselves, some for the sake of other things, some both.
2. Thus there must be an ultimate good that is good only in itself
3. “Happiness” seems to be to be that ultimate good.
4. “What is happiness” takes more than a sentence, but my money is that it’s closely related to things that are unique to humans.
5. That rules out much, but “reasoning”, particularly to the degree that we do it, is clearly unique.
6. I therefore identify the ability to reason as a core aspect of the happiness.
7. Given that we are naturally social creatures, it’s a short step to say that communicating our reasoning to others is a necessary consequence of the reasoning itself.
The result is that I see free speech as one of the top goods in a society. One in the neighborhood of the ultimate good and so indispensable in living a complete life.
To enshrine it in law for everyone rather than let individual power dictate who gets de facto FOS is to state that everyone deserves a full human life.
It’s not a mere tool or means to some other minor end.
> 1. Some things are good in themselves, some for the sake of other things, some both.
Some people may agree or disagree with this sentiment, that an action can be inherently right or wrong. Afterall, context makes all the difference.
> 3 “Happiness” seems to be to be that ultimate good.
Unfortunately, we know that this isn't the case. Even is an absolute morality exists (meaning that a thing could inherently right without relying on some other authority), we know that happiness is not it's ideal, because then Utilitarianism would be fundamentally right in all scenarios, and it just isn't.
Furthermore, if we characterise happiness as an absolute goal, then why not just hook your brain directly up to a Seratonin IV for the rest of your life?
=====
Free Speech is important because just having someone tell you something is true isn't enough. There needs to ALWAYS be an open forum for disagreement, of anything. Even if you think something is right, it shouldn't be free from criticism.
If an idea isn't strong enough to stand in a free speech debate then it isn't worth holding onto.
> Imagine you have free speech. Yay! Now what? Why was this so important again?
It's important because it's a human right.
> Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose.
No, it's a human right. Thinking that "human rights" are tools to serve a purpose is authoritarian thinking, where we grant people fictitious "rights" only if they serve some greater social purpose, but if that social purpose is threatened by those rights, we reserve the right to oppress them.
That said, I agree that recognizing free speech is a right doesn't mean it must be unrestricted. Other rights exist too after all.
"because it's a human right" isn't exactly a useful argument.
Someone decided to add it to the list of human rights. They did it because it is a useful tool (and likely because humans without it are somehow less than humans with it).
I don't think your answer is as useful as perhaps an explanation of why it is a human right.
(For context, I'm not from the US and I'm not coming from a background of belief in the US system particularly.)
> Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose.
You seem to hold that view that each legal right granted to people is a tool for a purpose. But some things are held, by some, to be worthwhile for their own sake. They are regarded as intrinsically worthwhile.
Consider:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed [...]"
That famous text talks about noble ideas such as life, freedom and justice as intrinsically worthwhile. They are not being granted as tools to provide some other social utility. They are the goals themselves.
It doesn't say life is protected because it makes society better, or that freedom is granted because it makes society more efficient or something.
It's the other way around. Within that framework for thinking about values, society and government are the tools; and life, freedom and happiness are the worthy goals.
Is it such a stretch to consider that free speech is part of personal freedom itself, therefore free speech is an intrinsically worthwhile goal to protect in and of itself?
If you do believe free speech is intrinsically worth protecting as part of life, freedom and happiness, you will surely butt up against the hard reality that it causes injustice and misery in some contexts by its effects. Speech has effects which deprive other people of these same intrinsically worthwhile things, including depriving other people of meaningful free speech. Ethical dilemmas do exist around free speech. Nonetheless, if you believe that it's intrinsically worthwhile because freedom is, you will surely make every effort to resolve ethical dilemmas in a way that keeps free speech as an elevated, worthwhile goal in and of itself, without it needing to be justified as a tool for any other purpose.
Here's what I don't understand about this argument: Why do slander and libel laws exist?
There's already limitations on free speech in place.
The article's broader point is that trust is low in a lot of institutions (for good reasons and bad) and thus the focus shouldn't be on censorship but on improving that trust. I agree with this approach.
However I think it is also important to recognize that propaganda has only become a more effective tool with the advent of social media. I don't think outright censorship is the correct path but I also don't believe slapping a "misleading" or similar tag on things actually qualifies as censorship.
> Here's what I don't understand about this argument: Why do slander and libel laws exist?
I would be interested in abolishing both, in fact. I suspect society might adapt well.
Currently, when someone makes an unsubstantiated statement towards someone, it still carries _some_ weight precisely because the audience thinks that the slanderer wouldn't risk punishment for no reason. Especially if the slander is written and signed.
(And we've carried over this mentality even in the age of the Internet where anonymous slander is largely risk-free. For some reason, when @Goku69420 tweets 'Everybody knows that Joe Blow is a goat-botherer!', our brains treats it more like a fellow citizen writing a letter to the editor, rather than as the digital version of toilet-wall graffiti.)
Imagine if we let a generation or two of legalized slander and libel pass. I suspect we might become used to the idea that even the nicest people will occasionally have random strangers claiming awful things about them, and slander not backed up by evidence or at least substantial credibility will become a non-issue.
Then again, I might be too optimistic. In the heyday of the 'yellow press', did most ordinary people treat their bylines with skepticism and amusement, like most people do nowadays with e.g. the Weekly World News? Or did they have a large audience of long-term believers, like even the most partisan talk shows do nowadays?
> But you've really got your head up your own ass if you convince yourself that you are protecting people by deciding the information that is appropriate for them to be exposed to.
The main point, from my POV, is that it's already being decided which information is appropriate for people to be exposed to, by "the algorithm" guessing which posts are most likely to get people to engage, and exposes them to those.
I don't particularly think censorship is the option. Unfortunately, the European Parliament just rejected a proposal to ban personalised algorithms in general, but I wouldn't be surprised if we'd need something like that to deal with this.
Wait.. what? Society has a trust problem? Implying we should trust people in power (economic and state) that have repeatedly and shamelessly acted for their own benefit against the interest of the public while they control the media (tv and online) to censor and/or shaddow-ban criticism and alternate views?
Yes, if that's what you mean. We have a trust problem because there are people in power who are not trustworthy. And yes, their acts of censorship will only make this problem worse.
The problem is we as a society have very few local level leaders. Most of the people who represent us often represent 1000+ individuals. At such a scale, the nature of leadership/politicians change...
Well then. They have always let everyone down. There is no point in relying on them for anything since they have a magnificent track record in disappointment.
No matter who is in power, it always ends in scandal and failure. It is completely unsurprising and as expected. If you are surprised, welcome to politics.
> Trust in social media and traditional media is at an all-time low.
Yeah, some of it is "people in power". And some isn't. But when you say
> Yes, if that's what you mean.
you sure look like you're trying to ignore what the article actually says, and twist the general idea to fit the axe you want to grind. That kind of stunt is (part of) why trust in society is low.
I think some of this debacle is changing who we trust.
Joe Rogan is rapidly becoming "the most trusted man in America". Russell Brand, another Leftist comedian, is moving from funny routines to scathing anti-corruption populist commentary. Tucker Carlson is now dominating Cable.
The big Pharma ad-supported mainstream media is rightly terrified of this. The gravy train is at risk.
Joe Rogan does cringe comedy. And there's plenty to both cringe and snicker about wrt. his recent podcasts on vaccines. I wouldn't call him "trusted" by any means.
> twist the general idea to fit the axe you want to grind.
From the article just after the line you quoted:
> Trust in the U.S. federal government to handle problems is at a near-record low. Trust in the U.S.’s major institutions is within 2 percentage points of the all-time low.
I can't possibly buy that fact that society has a problem if my aunt mary doesn't trust what plumberRob23 post on their instagram, so forgive for bothering only with the bigger issue at hand, which is systemic mistrust.
My intention wasn't to exclude general mistrust. My purpose was to pick on a title that appears to me as missleading (and a bit annoying, I admit).
I dislike these sort of titles that imply that we're all in this together and we are all at fault and this problem we are facing is some sort of natural phenomenon not tied to some people who are actually responsible
I reckon it's a human condition issue, bare metal type shit. People, in general, simply can't possess the merits of blind trust and must be scrutinized. This striated opinion on a spectrum of trust, and in time resolution in to facts. Dialectics of account. Naive interventions only stand to exacerbate the condition, by my reckoning, and I don't suspect there is a real way to make smart interventions at scale. I think the best resolution is to have modular multi-scalar and largely decentralized modes with far more outgrowths given the capacity for representation of their given polity.
But even in that case it doesn't fully rectify the problem, because at the basest levels information is imperfect in practical terms. It is in those terms that experts and professionals tend to be lost to public account - that is to say that making wide sweeping claims and saying it was some unexpected event that overturned their predictions frees them from being held accountable, and that is where trust is lost. If you tell me in 10 years that SPY will have gained 60%, versus if you said "Look I don't know, I can't tell you where the price is going to end at close today, let alone in 10 years, but historically the odds look good, that's not without caveats, the fed, the government, the people are all constantly evolving against their peers and there's a lot of novel forces, so you could end up with negative yields." The latter case is, let's say hypothetically, realistic, and thus eschews liability.
Now if the former case turns out to be true, certainly the latter form will be lambasted for the potential gains lost. In the latter coming to fruit, will the financier be celebrated? Will the former be able to excuse himself, despite bad calls?
I like your statement overall but let me hone a bit on this:
> I reckon it's a human condition issue, bare metal type shit
I strongly disagree here. It is very common and easy (and to me, boring) to promote all hard-to-solve, ugly problems to concequences of the evil "human nature" without even any data to support it.
Antithetically, humans want to trust. that's why a group operating within a trusted environment outperform a group operating in an emvironment without trust. Also, that's why trust is a possitive attribute.
The issue causing this trust problem at this great scale is conflicting interests, emerging from the private-centric properties of the economy. Because if you really dig it, all these issues will lead you to economy. Noone lost trust in a government because the President lied about their favourite colour.
You could argue that it is just another stage in 'Escape from Freedom'. I am going to simplify a lot here, but basically the process goes something like this:
-Things are hard; people fight and win some degree of autonomy
-Status quo sets in; people believe this is how it always will be
-Things get easy and people forget what freedom is
-Things get hard..
Sounds a lot like this saying that’s been going around the last few years:
“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”
Side tangent- I tried to find the author of that quote thinking it has to be a ‘wise man’ of the past (given that it’s not a gender neutral statement), and it looks like that it’s actually from a post apocalyptic book from 2016 that soon after became a meme.
I am vaguely aware of the meme you are referring to, but I want to stress that the idea is not entirely new[1] and is often reduced to the following citation:
"We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for."
I am saying that you are absolutely right that it is currently in a cultural spotlight of sorts, but it is hardly the whole story.
I can empathize with this line of thinking but its incredibly unimaginative. Censorship is a symptom of a larger problem and users reliant upon something that intentionally abuses them, like Facebook, is a different symptom of the same problem. To me that larger problem is centralized information ownership and people shouldn't trust it.
This is the compelling motivator of decentralization.
Decentralization isn't blockchain, web3, or whatever. Blockchain is third party storage.
In a decentralization scheme data resides at destinations. Nobody owns it but the destinations. Nobody observes it but destinations. There is no third party censorship.
The only users that have to suffer third party censorship are influencers and broadcasters who don't want decentralization.
One problem I am having is that on the left I thought things were pretty high quality from a facts / science side, and that has eroded. Fair disclosure - I'm a max dem donor and will likely continue to vote 100% dem.
7,000 (!) scientists have signed the John Snow memorandum. It states that "Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection".
This is despite the fact that our immune system has shown to work, pretty well, for almost ALL other influenzas and pandemics, that almost all analogous types of infections have LONG lasting natural immunity (MERS / SARS etc) etc.
The CDC director has signed this letter.
So we have a problem. CDC blocks testing, then says masks don't help, then says only vaccines can protect us. All these have (or will likely be) obviously false.
So trust in the left I think is diminishing - too many lawyers? Too many folks focused on politics? Too many public health officials / scientists and not enough hard science folks?
Sorry, how is this a left/right issue? The actions you describe the CDC having undertaken were under a right wing government. I don't know how you're making this a political divide issue.
The right has basically as far as I can see said get on with your lives, do what you want.
So I can wear a mask if I want as I understand it.
I can get a vaccine if I want.
If I've had covid I might decide that may provide some immunity.
I can go to the beach if I want
etc.
So while I don't agree with the right on many of their views (ie, vaccine effectiveness to the degree they have doubts there) - the rights views with respect to COVID seem less intrusive.
Masks do help, but save them for the healthcare workers
Masks do help, get one, a cloth one is fine.
Masks do help, double-mask
Mask do help, but you need N95 masks
Given that even with a properly fitting N95 mask that is form fitting you can still smell everything right through it, I think a properly fit, and negative pressure tested N100 or P100 is likely the actual protective standard of solid protection. Unfortunately, I have a few P100s sitting around and I can tell you that sleeping in one, or wearing one reguarly around town makes me feel I am living in a post apocalyptic dystopian future. Think 12 monkeys(1) minus the full chem/bio suit and crazy decon procedures.
This whole ordeal has greatly shaken my faith in technocratic government.
I started wearing an N95 with vent immediately. Pretty sure it works to protect me. I asked local public health folks if this was OK (back when they were saying only wear if sick) pointing out it just costs pennies. They said not to believe "misinformation" but they would not arrest anyone for wearing a mask.
Vent makes it extremely comfortable, no glass fog etc. Then they said the vent somehow was bad for others, but let others wear cloth masks. That made no sense, the vent is a hard stop and then exhalation goes towards ground. There are still plenty of people who think / lecture about a vent being bad.
And the lists goes on.
I had a friend who was a doctor who did an N95 + face shield and did not catch covid for months treating covid patients, so I do have some faith in N95.
Whether the vent is bad for others depends on whether the air from your breathing goes through any filter. COVID spreads with aerosols, and the more aerosols in the environment, the higher the chance of infection. You actually need to breathe in quite a bit of viral stuff in order to get infected.
If the vent allows for more aerosols than a closed surgical mask, then the vent is worse for the people around you. It's not really relevant where the vent is in the mask. But whether the difference is significant enough to cause a problem, I don't know.
I think what happened is capitalist forces looted the american middle class via immigration and money printing, then construed those political issues as leftist "for the common man" causes. People got swept up in that idea, the capitalist is now long gone from the public eye, and useful idiots are picking up the torch of middle class destruction, confused about the cause and effect of their politcal leanings.
We don’t have a trust problem. We have a lack of trustworthy people in positions of power problem. I see how one can be easily confused. But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders because they have show repeatedly they’re not worthy of trust.
You could argue that one begets the other. I am not going to argue chicken an egg, but US has generally been very anti-government. If you poll Americans about their representatives, the responses are uniformly negative. And yet, we keep re-electing them in massive numbers.
I was under the impression that Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Congress as a whole, but the individual representatives are about as popular as you'd expect.
I can't really speak for the entire nation ( I can't even speak for my neighbors ), but I am sure not approving of my representatives.. I do, however, lack in willingness/drive/money to push for someone else, because that is the part of the equation that makes it genuinely hard to remove an entrenched bureaucrat.
And that does not even begin to discuss how easy local party representatives make it to run in IL.
That exactly is the trust problem. Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power, if the public assumes that those in power are untrustworthy and corrupt? And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?
It's a vicious cycle, but a virtuous cycle would also work in the same way. Reality shapes people's expectations, and people's expectations shape reality.
> That exactly is the trust problem. Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power, if the public assumes that those in power are untrustworthy and corrupt?
To improve society.
> And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?
They were never trustworthy to begin with if they do that.
Trustworthy does not mean "acts to benefit themselves over others at every opportunity".
"never trustworthy to begin with" seems similar to the No True Scotsman[1] fallacy.
I've been in religious circles where it's very important to defend the idea that once you believe, you're saved. But there's a darker side to that idea, because in order to maintain belief in the face of someone doubting and leaving the faith, everyone in the faith explains it away with "Oh, they never Really Believed in the first place."
I can't see any connection to that fallacy. The question was about remaining trustworthy when incentives don't align. Being trustworthy when incentives do align means nothing at all though, does it?
People change. Environments can change people--not just incentives. "He was worthy of my trust, and now he's not" is a better framing when encountering new information than "he was never trustworthy to begin with" IMO.
> > Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power
> To improve society.
Is gaining power the most efficient way for a trustworthy and ethically constrained person to improve society? Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.
> Is gaining power the most efficient way for a trustworthy and ethically constrained person to improve society?
I don't know, I doubt anybody really knows. I suspect it would highly depend on the individual and the circumstance they find themselves in. Either way people do things that are not "the most efficient" all the time in all areas of their lives.
> Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.
I don't answer yes. I think a lot of charity work has pretty dismal results in improving society at a large scale to be honest, but that's another story. In any case it's quite possible to do both. Most political offices come with a salary.
> I don't answer yes. I think a lot of charity work has pretty dismal results in improving society at a large scale to be honest, but that's another story. In any case it's quite possible to do both. Most political offices come with a salary.
I find it unlikely that attempting to optimize somewhat for both effective charitable contributions and climbing the political ladder is likely to result in better outcomes than focusing your full attention on either goal individually. (Also r.e. charity work frequently having dismal results, that is why I specified "givewell's top picks" not "The Foundation for Curing Rare Cancers in Cute Puppies").
I do think that there probably are cases where your best bet for causing the change you want to see is going into politics, but I don't think that politics are high enough value that just being a generically ethical person trying to climb the ladder will have a sufficient positive impact to make it a better course of action than the alternatives.
Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of climbing that ladder though, or underestimating the potential for change.
I really don't know what you're trying to say or how it addresses what I wrote. It's not some big gotcha that, in your opinion, society could more efficiently be improved one way and not the other.
A trustworthy person might want to run for political office because they want to improve society with the power of that ofice. This is not up for debate. Certainly not by asking weird rhetorical questions. If you really want to argue the point then cough up a complete and coherent argument.
These conditions (power breeds corruption) have been true since the birth of democracy. And yet you could argue democracy in the US has a reasonable track record, with only the occasional civil war. Why is now the time it is under such attack?
It is far harder now to control the flow of information, as some Middle Eastern leaders discovered in 2011, and a short while later the various democracies of the world.
Consider a little the meaning of us having such a discussion here on HN.
> But we (the People) don’t trust politicians or business leaders
Part of the problem is bad grouping. I trust some politicians, and some business leaders on some topics.
But it's too easy to raise your idols on pedestals where they can do no wrong and you trust them on everything. (Conversely, of vilifying an entire class)
I've watched it happen to a significant proportion of the US population. Ironically, in those cases I've personally observed, it actually started from a distrust of the "establishment".
We never trusted politicians. We never trusted corporate executives.
We never trusted lawyers.
We used to trust that the large news organisations were somewhat self-correcting and accountable. The New York Times, Washington post, Wall st Journal, CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, etc.
After the total lack of accountability for Iraq and WMD, for 2 decades of Afghanistan, The Russiagate debacle and you can add a hundred things you've seen clearly yourself to this list. Trusting these news organisations is pathologically insane. They're clearly very happy to fabricate, to repeat and amplify pure propaganda with no evidence as fact and pretend it never happened or we were all in it together as though readers/watchers being duped are the real problem.
This is the trust that changed. Lies "for the greater good" have a huge interest rate when the bill comes due.
Nobody was ever inclined to really trust Trump, or Clinton or Bush or Obama or Biden any more than Nixon. Why would you? They're politicians. We trusted the limits on their power and the idea that there was corrective feedback on the system somewhere.
We used to think we wouldn't be subject to pravda levels of lies from our "diverse" media sources. Maybe we were terribly naive when we thought that. Now we know there are true stories, well reported in the Times and the Journal for example but you can't assume that about any given story, especially if it affects military funding either directly or indirectly.
All the WMD pushing assholes appear to be back pushing the next war and again if you think that going to war is not such a great idea given the last few unmitigated disasters you clearly are carrying water for Bin Laden, I mean Saddam, I mean the Taliban, I mean Assad, I mean PUTIN!
Trump (damn him) wanted out of Afghanistan like the majority of Americans. Suddenly there's a totally false story, usually fabricated that he's ignoring PUTIN's bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan to swing public opinion against the steps to get out.
Biden (let's go) agrees 100% with Trump and American voters that 20 years and 3 trillion is enough and continues Trump's work and gets out. The tone of reporting changes immediately and his popularity plummets.
Nobody "trusted" Biden.
Nobody "trusted" Trump.
Now many, many more of us from all political persuasions are very suspicious of the negative feedback mechanism to keep them in check because it has been abused so very, very badly.
Nothing like providing the raw footage and source documents to de-spin. Anyone doing that is the real focus of censorship.
Nobody ever did, nobody ever will trust such politicians whether you want them to or not. This kind of "trust" is not the point, has not and will not change.
There is another kind of trust that has been greatly damaged at considerable cost. The trust of the corrective mechanisms we use to keep the powerful (who we never have nor ever will trust) in check.
Starting with every large news source, journalist and pundit who cheered for the Iraq war and WMD to do a full and proper account of how they were used to dupe their readers and what they learned from it.
The next war is WMD with the same lying assholes cheering for it. And the one after that. The war machine is simply the most obvious and irrefutable case of it. 20 years and 3 trillion in Afghanistan - lets up the military budget again Joe! Just like Donald did. With zero "how is this paid for?" stories. With zero. "Is this value for money?" stories. With zero resistance to being passed...
Note that if the case for ever more military funding is strong, these questions can be asked, answered and debated thoroughly in the media. and by elected officials? So why aren't they?
If there are so many of you then you should start your own platform. There is no reason facebook/twitter/etc have to host your point of view. There is absolutely zero stopping people from doing this. There are conservative oriented web hosting services, put your stuff there and let the money and followers roll in. If your point of view is popular you will draw people in like flies to honey
Society has good reason to miss-trust governments, corporations, media, the education system and the entire pharma industry. Society does not have a "trust problem". The problem is that leadership in all the pillars of society have been abusing their position by controlling what people are aloud to do and what people are aloud to say by demonizing and even criminalizing anything that does not support their agenda.
I wish people didn't take every opportunity to self promote and pat themselves on the back.
Substack is just another primitive blog platform, with a little 'pay' button attached, nothing more.
It reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about black folks bragging about not going to jail, selling drugs, cheating on their wives or having multiple baby mamas. You're not supposed to do any of those things, you dumb muthafaka!
Freedom of press and freedom of speech exist exactly because government could not be trusted, and eventually, lies have to be covered by making it illegal to expose those lies. Censorship seems like a good idea until you realize the end game looks a lot like "Best Korea".
I try to read alternative media from all spectrums to get all the perspectives on what is truth, and the angles so regularly unmentioned.
However, this newly engorged and incestuous relationship between big Government, Big Media, and Big Tech, engaging in rampant deplatforming and counter-narrative suppression, is a civil liberties disaster of epic proportions.
This was obvious in the time when people that had the most rationale argument typically made decisions on how things should be. Now we live in a time where people who make the most money make the decisions on how things should be.
It's sad that Substack has to sit there and explicitly explain that "Here is where you go when you want no censorship and to have all different views in a big melting pot where it's up to you to sort them out through rational interrogation, thought and/or debate." Even in my lifetime I seem to recall that place was usually just called "society." Granted I was young and am partly remembering what I was told the world was like, rather than having experienced it directly. Nonetheless, they did bother to tell me that. That interrogation/debate process was understood to be an essential prerequisite for democracy.
Meh. It's consistent with their business model. And talking publicly about it is also consistent with their business model. The entire debate is a red herring.
Could you elaborate what you mean here? It seems obvious that it’s consistent with their business model, but I don’t get what point you’re making by saying that. Or how this means the debate is a red herring. Can you thread this together a bit?
I wish substack had better discovery features like Medium and fewer spammy emails. I signed up for Scott's blog and got like 30 emails in a week. Annoying
As a writer you can control how many emails are going out. You can create articles without sending an email at all. So it's that creator choosing to spam those emails...
Reading the comments here, I get the impression that a lot of folks view censorship as a tool of oppression by those in power and free speech as the shield against it.
If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it's that both "free speech" and censorship can be weaponised by those in power who wish to manipulate the discourse for their own personal gain.
If we want regular folks to have a greater say in public discourse again, we need to strike a balance that limits the use of both sides as tools of oppression.
I'd personally be in favour of fines or other punishments for deliberately or negligently propagating misinformation, assuming that the decision was made by a jury and not an unelected body.
By mass-publishing targeted misinformation backed by huge organisations, then claiming that anyone trying to limit their manipulation is undermining free speech.
"People with freedom are free to manipulate people" is such a dangerous perspective. People have actually been brainwashed to believe this... that freedom is dangerous.
Want to know how we should combat misinformation? Education.
>we allow people to sound what alarms they want and patrons to decide for themselves what to pay attention to
I think the above alteration throws the dilemma into a little sharper relief.
We live in a complex society which requires a degree of deference to "expert authority" in order to function. Our collective ability to agree on how to determine who (or what) qualifies as such an authority is not working well. I do not have any answers in which I am confident, just Socrates line on the beginning of wisdom.
So many of these threads are now filled with more than the normal "a company made me take something down because it violated TOS" and now has a cavalcade of conspiracy theories.
The tech community certainly wasn't immune to the craziness of the times.
Could increased censorship actually be making the misinformation problem worse?
If we are allowed to discuss and compare the merits of various theories, the wheat of truth naturally separates from the chaff of nonsense. When everything outside of The Approved Narrative is censored, people inevitably stumble across "banned" ideas - but there's no one to argue the other side or point out the flaws, making it far too easy to get sucked in.
As bad as twitter and Facebook censorship is, it's worse for other sites, like Reddit or probably any v-bulletin forum. Reddit subs have soooo much moderation, especially any sub that that is even slightly popular, so many arbitrary and hidden rules and content guidelines. On twitter I can call someone a jerk and the worst that may happen is the person may block me, but that will get your banned from many reddit subs.
Not when it’s a major hub-sub for a topic. A rogue moderator can take something like /r/spacex and completely ruin it then ban anyone who disagrees, to the point that people have to make stuff like /r/spacexlounge to have a functional community.
I find this sentiment profoundly confusing. Admins are also just mods. Being angry at mods and admins? Not confusing. Being angry at neither? makes sense. Being angry at one but not the other? I don't get it.
Maybe it's because I run a few websites off of a machine in my basement, and those are where I say the things I want to say. If another website wants to ban me then fuck 'em I'll say what I want from my own IP/domain. I have never felt particularly entitled to say whatever I want on other people's in-house implementations of vbulletin. I understand that platforms are different, and commented elsewhere on that stuff, but <img src="old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg">
Becoming a mod of your own subreddit takes about 2 seconds - all you have to do is push a button. Becoming an admin of your own site is a lot more effort, even for a tech professional.
Just adding onto this argument. Reddit moderators just don't know how to take criticism.
The lately famous /r/antiwork just had a moment. I tried to find the post where they were banning every dissenting opinion, but the thread got locked. Now the entire subreddit is locked. For reference here's a link to another subreddit locking a thread because the /r/antiwork mod got offended:
I've been using the site for ~14 years and watching its decline has been quite difficult. I really like the premise, but it clearly hit the limits of its system many years ago. I recall reading some commentary from one of the founders near the beginning. They were working on research to exploit crowd-funded effort. Effectively incentivising users just enough to encourage them to work for free. They came up with the distributed moderation system. Give egoists just a little bit of power and they'll spend 12 hours a day moderating Reddit for free.
This worked fine with smaller communities and the ability for competition when moderators overstep their mandate and make their communities a bad place. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this is all failing.
1. Reddit management has made their political leanings clear: if you are conservative, you are unwelcome. When I say "conservative" I'm not referring to the far-right. I'm referring to mainstream conservatism about family values, hard work, religion, etc. No example could better encapsulate their position than their "Anti-Evil Operations" team, which bans people for any and all reasons, including unpalatable political positions. Admins/staff on this team have been quite candid about their desire to ban conservative views. This aligns well with Reddit's announced IPO. Sanitising discussion to be advertiser friendly will help their bottom line.
2. The user base leans heavily left. It seems certain large websites have a theme now. When one considers the kinds of discussion which happen on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we all know which way those sites lean. Reddit is pretty hard left now. For example, the /r/Science subreddit is 24/7 "Study finds Trump voters have low IQ." The Joe Rogan fun subreddit is 24/7 "Does anyone else think Joe Rogan is Hitler?" There is zero space for nuanced discussion except in some very niche subreddits, and they are all inevitably taken over by a power mod who purges nuanced discussion.
3. The anonymous mod system is just not equipped to deal with tens of millions of users in a single subreddit. The top mod is the dictator, and they always end up enforcing their biases on the sub; overtly and subtly. This is exacerbated because of...
4. Subreddit squatting. A perfect example of this are the country name subreddits. Everyone from said country new to Reddit subscribes to these subs. They are all cheerleaders for a particular political party within each country. If you don't like that political party, you're marginalised and usually banned. It's not as simple as creating a competing country subreddit because few people will ever find it. No one thinks to search for "TrueCanada" if they're looking for "Canada." Of course, the the original subreddit automatically removes any mention of the competing sub, and bans anyone discussing it.
There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail. IMHO, Reddit is ready for a Digg-style exodus. People are just waiting for a clear alternative.
> Give egoists just a little bit of power and they'll spend 12 hours a day moderating Reddit for free
That really blew up in their face didn't it? 12 hours by the way is probably a low ballpark by the way. In my mind the power mods compulsively play Reddit like World of Warcraft addicts gearing up on a 7-day no shower session, going around silencing and ban-hammering users they dont like. I don't have the link but someone posted statistics of the top "players" in these communities, and it approaches something like making a post/comment/edit about every 6 minutes of being awake, or something equally ridiculous.
> There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail.
Couldn't agree more. Someone could probably write a thesis on the devolution of social media companies. I might be crazy but I see a pattern here. If it didn't have so much political implications I wouldn't care what a website here or there does, but it clearly has implications on real life.
Who is being censored? Sure people are banned from communities, but that is nothing new.
For most people, to host a blog, one can host a server at their house, through their own ISP, use the latest static website package, and share some links. It is a very low barrier to entry.
I think what people are actually saying is that they want the followers that these platforms provide them. They want to be able to push notifications and invade peoples' inboxes. They want entry into their day-to-day. You can't get that from your own host.
The problem is that accounts are tied to identities. Losing your Facebook or twitter account is a ban on the person; not only do you lose year's worth of contacts and content, but you are prohibited from making a new one, and if you do it may eventually be banned too.
Clearly, part of the problem is over reliance on experts. Somehow the professional class (empowered by Twitter and Social Media) has now convinced themselves that they're God's gift to to the world ... because they read a book.
And is totally oblivious to how stupid some of those things they're advocating for are.
When I go to a doctor, chances are he will prescribe me some drugs. Why? because thats what they're trained to do, rewarded for doing, and punished for not doing. If I go a mechanic, and ask him for a couch, he will probably offer me the back seat. If I ask my teacher, they'll tell me study hard and do my homework.
There's a good chance I neither want or need pills, or a backseat couch, or do homework all afternoon. This might be their best professional advice. But ultimately, I have to use my own judgment to assess risk and benefit since I have to live with consequences.
This is now somehow bad, and we're supposed throw out personal autonomy, and trust experts, newscasters and so on. But this has not worked out in the past, especially when there's coercion involved. By complying you're only empowering these people.
The antidote is to assert individual rights and especially freedom of speech. Build parallel societies. And ridicule the authoritarians.
if the problem is our culture trusting experts, perhaps we need some sort of revolution to get rid of those experts and elite, and turn to populism mass movements. Hold that thought, I seem to remember some historical trials of that path. How did they go? Strange how they ended up with even more censorship.
yeah, well, I would argue it was a populist movement that brought France, and the US the bill or Rights and the constitution. So it worked at least sometimes.
Not that I disagree that sometimes it did not work out for the better. Pol Pot being an example.
I’m less familiar with the french rev, but the American revolution isn’t exactly known for an antipathy to experts. That’s more pol pot as you say but I was specifically thinking of the maoist cultural revolution. As you can see there are many example of populist rejection of experts leading to truly great things. It should give pause to people.
Too bad that most of these experts you're talking about are sociopathic and egotistical growth hackers and nutritionists who overnight ended up being epidemiologists just because it helped them grow their brand.
So you’re saying we need people specialized in telling which experts are legit? Experts on experts, like yourself. Isn’t that relying on experts too?
I’m confused are experts good or bad or are we just supposed to castigate all of them since random people on the internet know better.
I’d rather an internet mob doesn’t decide the legitimacy of respecting experts especially when showing such an ignorance of other instances in the past when society at large turned on experts.
> This is now somehow bad, and we're supposed throw out personal autonomy, and trust experts
How do you apply your personal autonomy to a domain you know nothing about?
In fact, how do you even figure out you don't know enough about something to make a good judgement?
You might not need pills, but what if you do? Your personal judgement, made from a position of more or less total ignorance, is going to be wrong. In that case fine, your condition gets worse and has serious consequences, it's your choice I guess.
But when it comes to public health measures, and particularly contagious diseases, you're making the decision for other people too. Is your ignorant autonomy more important than other people's lives?
These are not easy questions, and I'm not proposing specific answers here, but "use your own judgement" isn't a panacea, especially when other people have to live (or die) with the fallout.
> How do you apply your personal autonomy to a domain you know nothing about? In fact, how do you even figure out you don't know enough about something to make a good judgement?
Mostly because the experts don't care about you and don't have the time to care about you. What trust can people have in doctors if they treat people like ATMs? My partner went to one of her doctors and he prescribed her a vaccine (not COVID or anything like that) for something that's more of nuisance than anything else. She wanted to take it but checked about it first. She also has an autoimmune disease. Turns out, even though her autoimmune disease is in her file, the doctor didn't even read the file and prescribed her a vaccine that should never be prescribed to someone with that particular AI disease. So yeah, talk about good judgement and trusting "experts".
It sounds to me like she picked one source of expert opinion over another, rather than ignoring 'experts' entirely. In that case using her judgement well. Perhaps as a society we need to get better at verifying 'experts' really are? And not letting them prescribe meds if not ...
I think that part of the problem is that we are under a disinformation attack. Russia did a lot around the elections, but I don't think they've gone to zero. I think both China and Iran are active. (The old Soviet "active measures" is what I have in mind - you get a number of sock puppets to all say the same idea, and it looks like that's what the consensus is, because people hear it from several sources.)
That erodes trust. You have people you know (or think you know) online who say really out-there positions. You either adjust your position, or you don't. Either way, you now have to distrust people you trusted before. (And, I suppose, me saying this reduces trust, too - how many of the people I respect online are actively sowing disinformation? How many are unknowingly passing it on?)
Then there's domestic disinformation. Both political parties (and their satellites) at least. Conservative and liberal think-tanks. (Don't kid yourself that only the other side does it.)
You could even consider regular commercial advertising to be disinformation, though I wouldn't go that far. But big corporations do engage in disinformation - think about the tobacco companies and "no, smoking doesn't cause cancer".
It's really hard to trust when people are actively, deliberately lying to you for their own advantage.
Too many people are confusing "censorship" and "content moderation".
Content moderation is when you determine what is published on your platform. Censorship is when someone else tells you want can be published on your platform.
Substack is probably making the right business decision, but the claim in this article is completely backwarrds.
Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted because they exercise extremely tight control over what gets published. Good news sources are trusted because they moderate content and exercise strict editorial control. Facebook is a untrusted cesspool of misinformation specifically because they moderate so lightly.
The idea that trust comes from lack of content moderation or editorial control is logically and empirically wrong.
> Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted because they exercise extremely tight control over what gets published.
Editorial endorsement and evaluation of content can be entirely decoupled from publishing. This is what "overlay journals" based on repositories like ArXiV do: they provide independent endorsement of papers published elsewhere.
A writer seeing the problems in the world slowly being censored, who hasn't been censored yet, is like a soldier writing about a war, who hasn't been killed yet. It doesn't seem that strange.
605 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadI hope they stick to their guns. History suggests they won't.
It's really the present day that suggest that substack won't be able to stick to their guns out of fear of organized opposition from "mobs". If they're able to maintain dependence only on subscribers, it's possible they can survive (and hopefully thrive) -- until somebody gets greedy.
Hell people I commonly talk to still believe a police officer was beaten to death on 1/6 and that people, other then the women shot for trying to enter the chambers, died directly due to the riot. All because of that what the news reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it.
I expect more from our leaders.
You should, and you should be free to discuss and write about exactly what your expectations are and how those leaders failed you.
But when they continue to lie to public, suppress facts, have a political agenda, and media is along with it, it’s becoming harder.
I still think CDC does good work. Just that the leadership needs to come out clean and apologize the public for being partisan.
Why are you saying "partisan" rather than "incompetent" ? It's surely convenient to blame the institutional incompetence on a strawman "other side", but the fact of the matter is that under administrations from both Parties they've repeatedly dropped the ball.
Distributing free rapid tests and finally recommending N95's after most everyone has stopped caring about pandemic is just icing on the cake. Biden's inauguration could have been a great time to break from the previous missteps, but the political narrative of "the pandemic is over thanks to vaccines" had to play instead. Which when you think about it is from the same exact vein of overly optimistic denial as "it'll be gone by Easter", just preached to a different choir.
I'd still say the majority of trust was squandered by public facing guidance and actions, rather than what happened behind the scenes.
The prosecutors do. None are being charged with insurrection nor terrorism, just trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Haven't 11 Oath Keepers been charged with "seditious conspiracy"[1]? Does that not come under the definition of "insurrection" - "a violent uprising against an authority or government"?
[1] "[If] two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States" via https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/par...
How many of these Oath Keeper individuals were directly led into this activity by FBI agents, CIs, "cutouts"/contractors, such as Ray Epps [1] and Stewart Rhodes[2]?
It appears that the recent charges of seditious conspiracy were in direct response to Darren Beattie's reporting of the coverup of Epps involvement, and Darren's drumbeat around Stewart Rhodes. This, after Darren uncovered FBI removing Ray Epps from the most-wanted list, hiding his name, and appearing to cover for their relationship with him during senate testimony.
[1] https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-prot...
[2] https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/stewart-rhodes-oath-keeper...
Jan 6th, BLM protests, and the pandemic are all Rorschach tests.
Unlike 9/11, the 1992 LA riots, and the Spanish Flu, the more recent events occupy a mushy middle ground of severity - a lot of people can go either way when deciding if they're the worst thing ever or just nuisances.
The ambiguity is causing people who feel strongly - in either direction - to lose their minds when they encounter dissenting or even just lackadaisically held positions on these events.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-authoritarians
Maybe you disagree with the linked article and think it really was a coup attempt. Fine, my point is that sensible people can disagree on how serious the Jan six riots were. That doesn’t mean that the first group is trivialising them.
Even participants declaring “this is a coup” does not make it by definition a coup.
Note that, while I didn't personally consume any sources of news making these mistakes about this event and therefore can't reasonably comment on them, this specific wording is used extremely commonly as an uncharitable attack on those who are opposite to one's own political leanings. I.e. corrections are always described as "quiet" despite frequently being published in the same manner as the original material.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol...
The article contradicts your claim "reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it". Firstly it is the first hit so hardly quiet. Secondly it outlines that initial reporting of Sicknick's death was simply reporting what capital police said, later revised by medical examiner. All front and center in this article.
All you need is a few other places making the same claim, sourced to NYT, and only the people that care enough will even click through to read the source. NYT isn't putting corrections on headline news for the same visibility as the nice fresh off the press article.
Maybe there should be a "major parts of this story were retracted by the media outlet" or something to news articles like this.
"quietly fixed" in that sense means "NYT reports one thing and it goes viral, corrects/updates/adds context later post-virality and, because it doesn't fit the existing narrative established by the initial viral story, most don't see it". Most people don't go back and check to see if a story they read 6 months ago has some new details that fundamentally change the impact of that story.
Whether NYT knows about this phenomenon, and (ahem "quietly") tunes their reporting to that phenomenon is a separate question.
If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like?
Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like alot of IT focused disruption (including disruption I've worked on directly myself as an IT practioner), all they achieved was recreate the very thing they sought to disrupt, but poorly and generally worse version of it.
Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
I am absolutely blaming them for this shitshow, yes, if we're defining content overload as the self licking ice cream cone of viral news.
What happened here was a parallel evolution. On social media, whatever got the most eyeballs got the most clicks and thus the most ad revenue, and engineers tuned the algorithm to exploit this.
Traditional Media sees this, and strives to do the same but the difference is that they are (and now arguably were) speaking from a position of moral and institutional authority, and have since diluted their brand and standing with clickbait, stories that were published without proper vetting, getting things outright wrong etc etc. That's their own God damn fault. Nothing was stopping say NYT from developing their own Substack or a version of it.
>Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
Again, you post on HN. You're an extreme outlier with the self awareness to know that certain media consumption habits are unhealthy and likely divinate a worldview where a reality forms based simply on what's in your newsfeed and not any underlying truth.
I don't know if we can even consider the NYT a reliable source. After all, it was the NYT's fabulist Walter Duranty that covered for Stalin's forced starvation of 7 to 13 million people in former Soviet countries [1], and actively wrote for the benefit of communism, rather than the truth [2]. And, for his deception, received a Pulitzer Prize [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
[2] https://codoh.com/library/document/stalins-apologist-walter-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_Pulitzer_Prize
In regards to the underlying events, and my motivation for commenting, it is splitting hairs. Media reported what was established at the time but none of it significantly changes the core history of what happened on Jan 6. The protest was violent with lots of assaults and injuries. This is now extensively documented, even with investigations still well in progress.
> The article contradicts your claim "reported and quietly fixed days later without ever really owning up to it".
It doesn't contradict the initial claim since the article to which you linked is from a year later. What you would need to do is establish the historical chronology of newspaper articles that did not report police lies and then quietly correct the record days later. Otherwise your counterclaim is very weak.
> Media reported what was established at the time
News media do not report what is established at any time. What is established is by nature not news. The presence of claims in the media are then used to convince people of what information is established as true. By uncritically repeating lies news media has been fanning conflict since before the sinking of the Maine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)
These two things are huge. They are not monolithic entities that "lie" or "don't lie". I think a big problem is such blind cynicism. Especially when the alternatives people are turning to are hilariously worse. I'd be more sympathetic to the claim that traditional media is terrible if they weren't using that to direct influence towards crazy uncles on facebook instead.
I think many things people think are "lies" are just uncertainties. The pandemic is full of these. There are a ton of confounding variables and we don't have any perfect control groups from which to make any conclusions. Basically every big issue that gets debated by the internet armchair experts is badly affected by this: COVID severity, the effectiveness of vaccines, masks, Ivermectin. Every damn thread is full of people speaking as authoritatively as they possibly can pointing to individual studies or data points without understanding the context, scale, or confounding factors.
I see this distinction made all of the time when this topic comes up. The mainstream media is untrustworthy. Corporate media has an agenda. Legacy media is corrupt. These qualifiers all imply that there is some non-traditional, non-corporate, non-legacy media that does not have these problems. Yet whenever the people making these distinctions are asked who/what these superior alternatives are, the answers are always underwhelming, or outright laughable.
So who are these beacons of truth you allude by contrasting the "traditional" media?
Once the idea of dangerous speech becomes aknowledged, censorship just becomes a game of degrees.
Substack's incentives are even worse than YouTube or Facebook.
If you think YT and FB were good for western democracy, then I guess you can die on that hill.
Otherwise, die on the hill of "fuck those profiteers and the very specific capitalists very much among us right now in this exact setting that enable them, who should probably know better by now"
I would contend that profit is at least partially the intention of these actors, largely indirectly by people who are invested in stock markets.
Capitalism is a symptom of power and information asymmetries. A few years ago, Zuckerberg said that all problems would be solved if everybody told the truth all the time. It's not that simple though. There's a Greg Egan story about a couple that undergoes a procedure to experience all the thoughts and feelings of each other for a period of time, which ultimately results in their breakup.
Free speech absolutists tend to jump to the defense of free speech and in the process ignore a real problem. Pro-censorship/content moderation folks tend to jump to the defense of censorship/moderation. In the process, the debate gets framed around "speech vs. censorship" instead of the serious issues with our political commons being dominated by sophisticated profit-seeking entities.
if you want to talk about power and information asymmetries, I suggest you look at Communist regimes.
Profit is definitely one motivation for censorship, but there has been plenty of censorship in non-profit-centric situations. Communist countries and other government actors have been leaders in censorship, with no obvious profit motive.
IMO, we should use "content moderation" for the former and "censorship" for the latter, congruent with historical usage. But people who are against content moderation will claim I'm being biased, even though I view the whole debate as a bit of red herring that distracts from the real issues. So I'd settle for "private-sector censorship" and "government censorship".
But in any case it's almost always counter-productive to conflate the two, to the point that it's a logical fallacy which should be named.
> i am not so sure if the distinction still exists when every conversation online is covered by private-sector censorship
That's certainly fair, and I think a particularly prescient observation in favor of the conclusion that it's time to severely restrict legal protections for social media platforms.
This implies you don't think "content moderation" is a "real" problem, which suggests to me you are biased. Also, "moderation" to me suggests mere moderation (consistent with fair, stated guideline) versus moderation "if you say things they don't like".
This kind of fight happens all over the place (e.g. what counts as hate/rape/murder etc), but I feel "moderation" is fairly neutral sounding without the implication of injustice befitting the act of being deprived of a a voice on omnipresent and monopolising platforms. It's also clear to me that some publications use comments sections as a way to manipulate public opinion, so cherry-picking/censoring them is an exercise in PR if (and only if) it isn't clear that result are being manipulated.
Everyone 'going transparent' in other words
The circle is looking more and more like the 1984 of our time
Oh erudite student of history, what then will stop the toxic vaccines and unethical medical studies from being halted then?
Such as:
The Cutter Incident [1] , The SV40 Contamination [2] , The Swine Flu Vaccine Debacle [3], The Vaccine Contamination disaster [4] , The Tuskegee Syphilis Study [5] , just to name a few.
We should be skeptical about the pros and cons of medical interventions, and also, non-interventions too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC452549/
[3] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200918-the-fiasco-of-th...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/us/politics/johnson-covid...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
As far as I'm aware, even early on in the cycle, realistic claims of effectiveness were being made, with some quibbling over data transparency that were resolved.
As we now have variants to contend with, that effectiveness in preventing infection has dropped precipitously. However the effectiveness at preventing hospitalisation and death is still pretty high.
If it was sold to you as 100% effective you were lied to. But if you were told that there were claims of 100% effectiveness which were clearly a lie, by someone trying to put you off vaccination, then you've been given false information there too.
They are still more likely to be infectious for longer, they are still more likely to clog up the hospital system, occupy ICU beds, and indirectly harm others who would usually be able to be treated but now can't.
And they're still dumbasses.
Frankly, imo, in the absence of effective accountability for ones' words or deeds, censorship becomes one of the only few remaining tools for stability.
Less than a century ago, many in the West sang the praises of communism as (unkown to them) a million people died in the Gulag. Things aren't always as they appear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
More about Kuran:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/11/wh...
Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-timur-kuran-economic...
When we condemn slave labor it's more childish tantrums. That's what wolf warrior diplomacy is really.
It's a state of more than a billion under its care yet on the political stage it's a huge Akira-sized baby with a big toy baton smash-smash-smashing any who dare discipline it.
So I'm in the awkward middle ground of believing it's counter-productive to try to shelter people from ideas but also believing that lots of people are very easy to manipulate, even so easy to manipulate that it can happen en masse and entirely by accident.
(I'm not arguing against the argument against censorship... it's just that I think the censorship issue is mostly a massive red herring when it comes to the issues that are discussed in the article.)
Don't think it is an accident. The ruling class has set this stage by design. There is little to no critical thinking being taught in K-12. Create a malleable population, then push censorship to protect them from themselves.
And while it can be quite important, it's also super exhausting. I think people's tolerance for that kind of work exists along a spectrum (probably with at least some biological component) but that no one can really do it all the time.
any subject requires a motivated attitude to succeed. Critical thinking also requires an attitude to value the topic IRL - but arguable that ought to be the case for all topics.
> It's the attitude of never taking anything you read or hear at face value.
A class in philosophy (or history) of science will teach you all the ways in which people where wrong before the process was established, and will make you see the value of science. CT is the same thing applied to everything, not just formal physical studies.
> it's also super exhausting
Only because most things are written to manipulate. If publications actually suffered for their reputation b/c of poor articles the whole thing would be easier. Also, if journalists set out to prove their claims, and properly source them - arguably something like Wikipedia is a group effort to do what is hard for the individual (I think it fails, btw, by leaning too much on published material).
Or to think about it from an information security perspective, once you adopt a specific defense mechanism, someone will look for ways to exploit it. This one is particularly easy to exploit.
This is not congruent with profit motive, so they will fail. Either as a company or as at this goal. Almost certainly the latter.
Google set out to not be evil and Zuckerberg set out to connect the world. Both, I'm sure, sincere.
One thought experiment that has helped me get my mind around the problem is "why is it necessary that parents shield children from some information?"
I think free speech might have a context that is invisible to us. Something like a prior, or trained neural net, in which free speech and no censorship is absolutely the right thing. And then there might be other contexts where it is wrong, and harmful.
In other words, "dangerous ideas" may be the wrong way of thinking about free speech--it might be "dangerous contexts" of our minds--such as childhood. If so, what then?
I'm strongly for free speech. But it logically entails allowing people to lie as much as they want.
A great analogy is to think of an eggshell with a chick inside. The eggshell provides protection for a long time but is also restrictive. When the chick is strong enough it will break free. But if it breaks free too early it won’t be strong enough to survive in the world.
If so, how was "manipulation" defined exactly?
Breaking an eggshell requires effort, and seems kind of like a "test" to me. But in most human societies, it's possible to simply let time pass and you will reach the "age of majority" (usually 18 or 19 years old). I wonder if we're doing a disservice by allowing children to cross that boundary without any "eggshell test".
I'd argue that paternalism is particularly justified in relationships that are literally paternalistic.
The issue is that the justification for my neighbor paternalistically dictating how I should live my life is much weaker a parent dictating to their child. We shouldn't deeply have to delve into why this is the case.
/s, in case it wasn't obvious...
People are more certain of their own position than is warranted. This is true in politics (as C. S. Lewis said, in practice no policy can be more than probably correct). It was true with Covid ("trust the science" when not enough science had been done yet; people talked as if the correct course was obvious and certain, and they were often wrong in hindsight). And it will be true again, and again, and again.
And from that false certainty, people regard contrary opinions/interpretations of the data as not just false, but morally wrong. And then they regard people believing the "obviously wrong" position as a sign that people are stupid and not to be trusted with the facts. (Unlike themselves, of course, who clearly can be trusted with the facts, because they reached the right answers!)
And people don't see the dichotomy between "people are stupid and evil, and can't be trusted with the truth" and "we (who are also people!) can decide what is true, and can be trusted to only tell them the truth". When you point a finger at someone, four finger point back at you...
We know some things are wrong, we have evidence that they're wrong, and believing in some of those things can cause people to take actions which endanger and even kill others.
So what do you do? I'm not advocating censorship as a solution, but simply throwing up your hands and saying "who are you to judge?" isn't really working either.
It depends on the specific issue. But since we agreed we didn’t want censorship, we err on the side of caution present our evidence with hopefully better and more thorough research supporting it.
Again, please don’t interpret this as “we need censorship”, that’s not what I’m getting at.
The notional “marketplace of ideas” is clearly not functioning in the presence of a lot of people who are not interested in whether their ideas stand up or not, and a whole boatload of motivated mudslingers. I don’t know a good answer, but “present your arguments better and hope” doesn’t seem to be one.
That concerns you as well. Thats the whole issue. There is no "reasonable default" to fall back on. That you have identified some rather obnoxious idiots doesnt mean you are suddenly smart enough to tell the rest of the world what to do. Especially since chances are you have fallen for sock puppets aimed at creating a reaction in you to get you to accept and call for authoritarian solutions.
Authoritarian solutions dont work. Just wanting them to work doesnt work, a short look into history shows that. Reality in the end is really complex. Too complex to just force other people around no matter how smart somebody feels on the topic. Because thats how stupid people always think of themselves, "smart enough" to understand the implications of forced actions just this one time.
edit: All of this not to mention that it always create a reaction in people. Which leaves us with conflict on topics we should be able to find a consensus.
Just to add - I specifically said I didn't advocate censorship, and asked what actions might be taken. Do you have any ideas in that direction? Or is the idea of taking any action, however small (for instance better education in evaluating information) offensive to you in an axiomatic way?
Differently put, you are looking for somebody smart to fix the situation for you. I looked around and there dont seem to be any to spare so we will have to do with us idiots. And once idiots start forcing other idiots around, those idiots push back. Which leaves us with a lot of pushing and pulling in a worse situation all together.
>Do you have any ideas in that direction?
Most idiots seem to mean well so lets see if we cant agree on a consensus about the state of reality and our criteria for acceptable solutions till some smart aliens show up to run this shitshow for us. We wont find a solution for everything but i am confident we could get really far by just agreeing on a reasonable minimum.
I think the problem stems from the lofty goal of finding actual solutions that arent horrible and applicable everywhere. Which we dont have now. Best we can do is look at existing solutions for specific problems and see if we cant agree on improvements. Being motivated by understanding the cost and risk of authoritarian solutions. Which we can communicate. Which just requires a willingness to communicate which goes out of the window once you create a conflict.
tldr: Trying to dictate what people think was tried and failed multiple times before. Its a really really bad idea. Wanting it to work doesnt change that, since you can explain why it fails reliably. Its the same reason that makes the idea so tempting in the first place.
You seem to be lost in a sea of relative opinion, and of all viewpoints being equally valid/stupid. That's far from always the case.
Again, by this logic, we should never address crime because by it's very nature a court case is trying to establish what are or are not real facts about a case in the face of conflicting opinion. Are we too stupid to have courts?
If not, then we're not too stupid to evaluate reality. That doesn't mean censorship. I'm not advocating censorship. I just don't think we're on such a foundation of sand as your comments assert.
Edit: I am rate limited so can’t respond below, but I wanted to say in response - I disagree that we don’t have the ability to say some things are counterfactual, and I also disagree that admitting this implies censorship or other authoritarian action is either good or necessary. I further disagree that communication is sufficient on its own when propagation of counterfactual information costs lives. Is there another solution? I don’t know, but I do think better education has to form part of it.
Does scientific knowledge “dictate facts”? It tells us some things are wrong, while leaving open the possibility of further learning.
edit: was an answer to the first sentence before the edit
To the rest, the problem is finding a basis solid enough for authoritarian action on such a delicate problem as speech (which requires another level then say a court case). Its not either quicksand or a rock but a minimum required level on the spectrum. If you dictate facts, you are dictating that this description encompasses all perspectives and every additional one is wrong. More then that, you dictate that those are all the implications. Its claiming you reached the end of knowledge.
You either can convince people that you are talking about facts or you cant. The problem is communication and not lack of force. As the issue here is only solvable with the former without accepting an inevitable crash in the future. You bringing up censorship is counterproductive for this reason. Somebody (not necessarily me) being able to explain that should be an example for an alternative.
Should have had a coffee first sorry
It's an interesting exploration of the problems with fact checkers and weaponised use of 'facts' in online discourse.
It's also pretty much exactly what I was talking about when I said I was not talking about censorship, which you repeatedly ignored in the above discussion.
There are other avenues to explore here, in which we can look at whether information is correct and put it in context, than just heavy handed government action or merely better presentation of one side of an argument.
I have a slightly different opinion from /u/ cf141q5325's. I think the problem isn't stupidity, it's hunger for power.
When you grant someone the authority to decide what other people should do, you can optimize for intelligence all you like, but the ones who will actually _struggle_ to get that position are the ones who want to be able to tell other people what to do.
Separation of powers is a partial remedy to this. You can either make the rules, or enforce the rules, but not both. (Democracy is another remedy, also partial.) We _can_ have courts because becoming a judge isn't quite as attractive as becoming a dictator.
A gigantic issue with the current 'fight against misinformation' is that it features no separation at all. When it comes from the government, it's typically designed, evaluated, and enforced by the executive branch alone. And when it comes from private entities, it's completely arbitrary and tyrannical according to whatever mood the CEO wakes up in that morning.
It would be shocking if communication was literally the only area of human endeavor which couldn't or shouldn't be regulated. Stranger yet to pose the idea on a moderated forum. Turns out authoritarian solutions do work.
Regulating communication is one of the most dangerous kinds of regulation, as it regulates what people think. And once you limit on your ability to think its very likely that you are about to crash into something, seeing as stupidity boils down to being unaware of another perspective. Its akin to blindfolding drivers of cars so they dont get distracted to reduce crashs.
We're just meat computers, and information hygiene (or the lack thereof) actually matters and has a big impact.
I don't think it's a coincidence that people who support censorship think of humans as "meat computers". I suggest that if someone says "we are meat computers," we start treating them like one, i.e. ignoring them.
[citation needed]
Now propaganda and conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. There's no need to censor anything because few can tell fact from fiction anyhow.
.......what does Marcellus Wallace look like?
Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose. In the relationship between a powerful government and a collection of individually vulnerable citizens, it pushes the power balance farther toward the individual.
Is the goal to give all the power to the individual? No, that's not the goal. The goal is to have some sort of equilibrium between the powers of the government and the powers of individuals. The point of equilibrium is fuzzy and ill-defined, but it's characterized by an increase in stability.
The point is that free speech is not a sacred irreducible holy thing. It's an important thing that serves a purpose. It's not absolute. It's possible for something in a given situation to be more important than free speech.
The government is "individuals"! Every bit of power you take from the individuals in society, you give to the individuals in government. And historically the vast majority of these people have been corrupt and self-serving, because such kinds of people are attracted to positions of power, and most voters can't tell the difference between a good person and a skilled liar. Government attracts narcissists, as it requires a certain kind of narcisissm to go about telling people that they should live their lives how you want, not how they want.
Reading your post helped me feel calm and at ease, nudging me back towards this realization. So thank you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
So, it's not, it's just the first change to an already existing document. The first article of your constitution describes the legislatives institutions. I (vaguely) know that, I'm not even American.
Some states (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut) ratified the Constitution before the Bill of Rights was formally drafted[1] and initially without requiring the Bill of Rights. The Massachusetts Compromise was an agreement that the Bill of Rights would be packaged with the new Constitution (with the BoR being active at ratification, before the Constitution) and was required before some of the remaining states would ratify the Constitution.
It's worth pointing out that the Bill of Rights was ratified 2.0 years after the first elections for national office and 1.5 years after the constitution was finally ratified. [1]
[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/blog...
Extrapolating from your examples it seems that only democracies (and the hypothetical benevolent dictator) grant individuals human rights. The question is: What comes first, democracy or human rights?
I feel this question about human rights falls into a similar category. They are required. If you want to go deeper into the reasons, you need to spend a lifetime studying philosophy and ethics and whatnot.
Why are they required and what are they required for? Countries exist that don't have the exact same human rights, so clearly those rights don't need to exist for a nation or an individual to successfully exist.
Any time someone invokes "human rights" or "natural rights", it's worth at least referencing a common basis of facts written somewhere. Without this, such discussion is likely to follow two diverging paths and the people discussing it likely aren't talking about the same concepts. The relevant Human Rights document is usually the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1] and Free Speech/Expression is Article 19.
Some people sat down and decided the list of things that are "human rights". Lots of other people object to some of the items on that list, so it's not exactly infallible.
North Korea is a good example of a place with the lack of 1A protected speech from government interference, but it also has lots of other "human rights" violations, so you aren't really clarifying the problem with free speech by using it as an example. North Korea frequently violates most of the 30 UN declared human rights articles, so the connotation of using that country as an example leads to conflation of other issues.
Everything that creates or improves "personal feelings" isn't a human right, so that doesn't help the discussion much either.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
In particular to the Freedom of Speech discussion, the most important part is the list of exemptions. Even China would argue they give their people Freedom of Speech, but they have more restrictions/exemptions than other countries. Hence, they are not universal in a practical sense and the details must be discussed.
The "Human Rights" discussion is different from a law of physics. It is a human-curated list of rights and they all have restrictions and exclusions, which is core to the "censorship by private companies on their properties" discussion.
It's helpful to discussions of "Human Rights" or "Natural Rights" to point to a written document that disambigautes the terms and enumerates the specific rights, so we know we are discussing the same thing.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 says
> Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.[1]
[1] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
You say free speech is a tool that serves a purpose. Then you imply that the purpose of the tool is to push the balance of power toward the individual. The goal in pushing the balance of power to the individual is to have an equilibrium between the individuals' and the government's power. This equilibrium is characterized by an increase in stability. It seems fair to summarize this as "free speech is a tool that serves the purpose of increasing stability".
You conclude: "It's possible for something in a given situation to be more important than free speech." I think it's implied here that this "something" is (an increase in) stability. If stability is more important than free speech, it implies free speech should be restricted in order to achieve stability. In other words, censorship should be applied in order to achieve more stability.
Free speech and stability are not in competition with each other. They’re different categories of things.
Please help me out a little and try really hard to not interpret what I said in the worst possible way.
I don't feel like I'm interpreting your posts in a particularly negative way. I'm just trying to be explicit about the kind of tradeoff you're proposing. If you find yourself flipping your stance once the flowery rhetoric is translated into basic, actionable language, someone is getting fooled and it's not me.
1. Do you, or do you not, think that there can be something which is more important than free speech and which leads (among other things) to increased stability?
2. Do you, or do you not, think that if this something is more important than free speech, the consequence of this is that free speech can be restricted for this thing?
2.) yes
Every single Western democracy on this planet restricts free speech in exactly the way parent described - as a trade-off between the rights of the individuals and the rights of the souvereign [1]. Even the US has a long list of restrictions to free speech.
The question is not whether to restrict free speech, the question is where to draw the line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
For eg.: copyright is a form of censorship.
suppression of speech != restriction of free speech
It is a very very delicate and complicated balance - what I am objecting to is to ignore that this balance exists.
If you disagree with the word "restriction", let me rephrase as "free speech has limits" or "free speech is not the end goal".
"In the United States, freedom of speech and expression is restricted by time, place and manner"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
> a restriction of speech that you agree with
It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree. It matters whether we, as a society, can find a balance between the rights of the individuals and the rights of the sovereign/state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
Yes. And this is called... censorship. Even when we, the good guys, do it. You can't just change the definition of words based on whether a western democracy or an authoritarian hellhole does it, when they're doing exactly the same thing.
Edit:
> Censorship usually (also) refers to restrictions of free speech typical for non-democratic societies [1], which doesn't lead to productive discussions (in my experience). It is not uncommon to see the false conclusion "censorship is used in authoritarian countries therefore free speech must not be restricted".
If people make a faulty argument, point out the fault in the argument. No need to change the definition of words so the ground shifts under their feet. FWIW, I think "censorship is a prime feature of authoritarian governments" is a perfectly valid argument against, ahem, restricting free speech.
> they're doing exactly the same thing.
No, they aren't, baseline and context matters. You are falsely equating the removal of say, anti-vax conspiracy content in the US, with the removal of say, political/homosexual/religious/ethnic content in an authoritarian regime. If you don't believe me, ask somebody who was forced to flee their country due to any of the above reasons.
> point out the fault in the argument.
Let's assume 'censorship' == any restriction to free speech. We already agreed that every Western democracy has such restrictions or 'censorship'. How can "authoritarian regimes use 'censorship'" now be an argument against 'censorship'?
To paraphrase (not a perfect analogy), murderers use knives, and chefs use knives, but "murderers use knives" is not valid argument against knives?
I understand if you disagree with already existing restrictions of free speech in Western democracies, is that what you mean?
You're making a false assertion that attaching consequences to some speech is censorship. No one can prevent you from yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. There are however post hoc consequences for doing so falsely, as doing so is very dangerous to others.
Even then you have the opportunity to defend yourself in a court of law. You may have been thought there was a fire in the theater but simply been mistaken. That's why laws include clauses of intent.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech.
It is part of human dignity, at least for some people: not to be muzzled by somebody else on the account that (s)he is of a) nobler birth, b) dominant religion, gender or race, c) physically stronger, d) elected to decorate some office etc.
This is an intangible, but very important human asset. So many people live in countries where they would like to walk free and criticize what they do not like, but must cast down their eyes in fear of every uniform. The feeling of liberation when such a regime falls down is indescribable.
I saw the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution unfolding. It wasn't just a technical adjustment; for the first time in years people could (verbally or literally) spit on their former tyrants and walk free.
As an example, in both Czech Republic and Slovakia denying Holocaust is a crime. I’m sure new examples will come in future, though I hope we will not have to endure another mass horror and/or loss of life for that.
So, how about as a thought experiment we invert the aforementioned construct “allowed = everything except set X” and think of it as “allowed = one giant set Y”. Looks like we believe we must allow only certain things for humanity to exist and progress—so what is the criteria shared by speech in set Y? Random idea; what if it has less to do with what is said but the intent of it? However, the intent can never be communicated perfectly or proven, so it doesn’t seem feasible to restrict based on it, and we have to resort to substance banning instead.
Another thought, if we eliminate all mental issues and insecurities that cause people to attack (and agitate others to join) a group or generally behave in a way that is detrimental to others for personal gain, would we still need to restrict freedom of speech? Or is that an unrealistic scenario generally?
So people are wise to insist on their right to make live hard for government. Until it repents this will not change.
1. Some things are good in themselves, some for the sake of other things, some both.
2. Thus there must be an ultimate good that is good only in itself
3. “Happiness” seems to be to be that ultimate good.
4. “What is happiness” takes more than a sentence, but my money is that it’s closely related to things that are unique to humans.
5. That rules out much, but “reasoning”, particularly to the degree that we do it, is clearly unique.
6. I therefore identify the ability to reason as a core aspect of the happiness.
7. Given that we are naturally social creatures, it’s a short step to say that communicating our reasoning to others is a necessary consequence of the reasoning itself.
The result is that I see free speech as one of the top goods in a society. One in the neighborhood of the ultimate good and so indispensable in living a complete life.
To enshrine it in law for everyone rather than let individual power dictate who gets de facto FOS is to state that everyone deserves a full human life.
It’s not a mere tool or means to some other minor end.
You could see lungs as a tool to breathe, it doesn’t mean they aren’t essential.
Some people may agree or disagree with this sentiment, that an action can be inherently right or wrong. Afterall, context makes all the difference.
> 3 “Happiness” seems to be to be that ultimate good.
Unfortunately, we know that this isn't the case. Even is an absolute morality exists (meaning that a thing could inherently right without relying on some other authority), we know that happiness is not it's ideal, because then Utilitarianism would be fundamentally right in all scenarios, and it just isn't.
Furthermore, if we characterise happiness as an absolute goal, then why not just hook your brain directly up to a Seratonin IV for the rest of your life?
=====
Free Speech is important because just having someone tell you something is true isn't enough. There needs to ALWAYS be an open forum for disagreement, of anything. Even if you think something is right, it shouldn't be free from criticism.
If an idea isn't strong enough to stand in a free speech debate then it isn't worth holding onto.
It's important because it's a human right.
> Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose.
No, it's a human right. Thinking that "human rights" are tools to serve a purpose is authoritarian thinking, where we grant people fictitious "rights" only if they serve some greater social purpose, but if that social purpose is threatened by those rights, we reserve the right to oppress them.
That said, I agree that recognizing free speech is a right doesn't mean it must be unrestricted. Other rights exist too after all.
Someone decided to add it to the list of human rights. They did it because it is a useful tool (and likely because humans without it are somehow less than humans with it).
I don't think your answer is as useful as perhaps an explanation of why it is a human right.
> Free speech is not an end goal. It's a tool that serves a purpose.
You seem to hold that view that each legal right granted to people is a tool for a purpose. But some things are held, by some, to be worthwhile for their own sake. They are regarded as intrinsically worthwhile.
Consider:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed [...]"
That famous text talks about noble ideas such as life, freedom and justice as intrinsically worthwhile. They are not being granted as tools to provide some other social utility. They are the goals themselves.
It doesn't say life is protected because it makes society better, or that freedom is granted because it makes society more efficient or something.
It's the other way around. Within that framework for thinking about values, society and government are the tools; and life, freedom and happiness are the worthy goals.
Is it such a stretch to consider that free speech is part of personal freedom itself, therefore free speech is an intrinsically worthwhile goal to protect in and of itself?
If you do believe free speech is intrinsically worth protecting as part of life, freedom and happiness, you will surely butt up against the hard reality that it causes injustice and misery in some contexts by its effects. Speech has effects which deprive other people of these same intrinsically worthwhile things, including depriving other people of meaningful free speech. Ethical dilemmas do exist around free speech. Nonetheless, if you believe that it's intrinsically worthwhile because freedom is, you will surely make every effort to resolve ethical dilemmas in a way that keeps free speech as an elevated, worthwhile goal in and of itself, without it needing to be justified as a tool for any other purpose.
There's already limitations on free speech in place.
The article's broader point is that trust is low in a lot of institutions (for good reasons and bad) and thus the focus shouldn't be on censorship but on improving that trust. I agree with this approach.
However I think it is also important to recognize that propaganda has only become a more effective tool with the advent of social media. I don't think outright censorship is the correct path but I also don't believe slapping a "misleading" or similar tag on things actually qualifies as censorship.
I would be interested in abolishing both, in fact. I suspect society might adapt well.
Currently, when someone makes an unsubstantiated statement towards someone, it still carries _some_ weight precisely because the audience thinks that the slanderer wouldn't risk punishment for no reason. Especially if the slander is written and signed.
(And we've carried over this mentality even in the age of the Internet where anonymous slander is largely risk-free. For some reason, when @Goku69420 tweets 'Everybody knows that Joe Blow is a goat-botherer!', our brains treats it more like a fellow citizen writing a letter to the editor, rather than as the digital version of toilet-wall graffiti.)
Imagine if we let a generation or two of legalized slander and libel pass. I suspect we might become used to the idea that even the nicest people will occasionally have random strangers claiming awful things about them, and slander not backed up by evidence or at least substantial credibility will become a non-issue.
Then again, I might be too optimistic. In the heyday of the 'yellow press', did most ordinary people treat their bylines with skepticism and amusement, like most people do nowadays with e.g. the Weekly World News? Or did they have a large audience of long-term believers, like even the most partisan talk shows do nowadays?
The main point, from my POV, is that it's already being decided which information is appropriate for people to be exposed to, by "the algorithm" guessing which posts are most likely to get people to engage, and exposes them to those.
I don't particularly think censorship is the option. Unfortunately, the European Parliament just rejected a proposal to ban personalised algorithms in general, but I wouldn't be surprised if we'd need something like that to deal with this.
Yes, if that's what you mean. We have a trust problem because there are people in power who are not trustworthy. And yes, their acts of censorship will only make this problem worse.
No matter who is in power, it always ends in scandal and failure. It is completely unsurprising and as expected. If you are surprised, welcome to politics.
> Trust in social media and traditional media is at an all-time low.
Yeah, some of it is "people in power". And some isn't. But when you say
> Yes, if that's what you mean.
you sure look like you're trying to ignore what the article actually says, and twist the general idea to fit the axe you want to grind. That kind of stunt is (part of) why trust in society is low.
Joe Rogan is rapidly becoming "the most trusted man in America". Russell Brand, another Leftist comedian, is moving from funny routines to scathing anti-corruption populist commentary. Tucker Carlson is now dominating Cable.
The big Pharma ad-supported mainstream media is rightly terrified of this. The gravy train is at risk.
Spot on
From the article just after the line you quoted:
> Trust in the U.S. federal government to handle problems is at a near-record low. Trust in the U.S.’s major institutions is within 2 percentage points of the all-time low.
I can't possibly buy that fact that society has a problem if my aunt mary doesn't trust what plumberRob23 post on their instagram, so forgive for bothering only with the bigger issue at hand, which is systemic mistrust.
I object to your trying to paint it as if it's only mistrust of major institutions. It's untrue to the article to limit it like that.
I dislike these sort of titles that imply that we're all in this together and we are all at fault and this problem we are facing is some sort of natural phenomenon not tied to some people who are actually responsible
But even in that case it doesn't fully rectify the problem, because at the basest levels information is imperfect in practical terms. It is in those terms that experts and professionals tend to be lost to public account - that is to say that making wide sweeping claims and saying it was some unexpected event that overturned their predictions frees them from being held accountable, and that is where trust is lost. If you tell me in 10 years that SPY will have gained 60%, versus if you said "Look I don't know, I can't tell you where the price is going to end at close today, let alone in 10 years, but historically the odds look good, that's not without caveats, the fed, the government, the people are all constantly evolving against their peers and there's a lot of novel forces, so you could end up with negative yields." The latter case is, let's say hypothetically, realistic, and thus eschews liability.
Now if the former case turns out to be true, certainly the latter form will be lambasted for the potential gains lost. In the latter coming to fruit, will the financier be celebrated? Will the former be able to excuse himself, despite bad calls?
> I reckon it's a human condition issue, bare metal type shit
I strongly disagree here. It is very common and easy (and to me, boring) to promote all hard-to-solve, ugly problems to concequences of the evil "human nature" without even any data to support it.
Antithetically, humans want to trust. that's why a group operating within a trusted environment outperform a group operating in an emvironment without trust. Also, that's why trust is a possitive attribute.
The issue causing this trust problem at this great scale is conflicting interests, emerging from the private-centric properties of the economy. Because if you really dig it, all these issues will lead you to economy. Noone lost trust in a government because the President lied about their favourite colour.
Apparently yes. For example, here's what Dr. Fauci was saying about HIV/AIDS in the 80's. [0]
[0]: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/fla...
-Things are hard; people fight and win some degree of autonomy -Status quo sets in; people believe this is how it always will be -Things get easy and people forget what freedom is -Things get hard..
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Side tangent- I tried to find the author of that quote thinking it has to be a ‘wise man’ of the past (given that it’s not a gender neutral statement), and it looks like that it’s actually from a post apocalyptic book from 2016 that soon after became a meme.
Source: https://www.slanglang.net/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men...
"We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for."
I am saying that you are absolutely right that it is currently in a cultural spotlight of sorts, but it is hardly the whole story.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
This is the compelling motivator of decentralization.
Decentralization isn't blockchain, web3, or whatever. Blockchain is third party storage.
In a decentralization scheme data resides at destinations. Nobody owns it but the destinations. Nobody observes it but destinations. There is no third party censorship.
The only users that have to suffer third party censorship are influencers and broadcasters who don't want decentralization.
7,000 (!) scientists have signed the John Snow memorandum. It states that "Furthermore, there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection".
https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html
6th paragraph
This is despite the fact that our immune system has shown to work, pretty well, for almost ALL other influenzas and pandemics, that almost all analogous types of infections have LONG lasting natural immunity (MERS / SARS etc) etc.
The CDC director has signed this letter.
So we have a problem. CDC blocks testing, then says masks don't help, then says only vaccines can protect us. All these have (or will likely be) obviously false.
So trust in the left I think is diminishing - too many lawyers? Too many folks focused on politics? Too many public health officials / scientists and not enough hard science folks?
So I can wear a mask if I want as I understand it. I can get a vaccine if I want. If I've had covid I might decide that may provide some immunity. I can go to the beach if I want etc.
So while I don't agree with the right on many of their views (ie, vaccine effectiveness to the degree they have doubts there) - the rights views with respect to COVID seem less intrusive.
Actually, they said this:
Masks don't help
Masks do help, but save them for the healthcare workers
Masks do help, get one, a cloth one is fine.
Masks do help, double-mask
Mask do help, but you need N95 masks
Given that even with a properly fitting N95 mask that is form fitting you can still smell everything right through it, I think a properly fit, and negative pressure tested N100 or P100 is likely the actual protective standard of solid protection. Unfortunately, I have a few P100s sitting around and I can tell you that sleeping in one, or wearing one reguarly around town makes me feel I am living in a post apocalyptic dystopian future. Think 12 monkeys(1) minus the full chem/bio suit and crazy decon procedures.
This whole ordeal has greatly shaken my faith in technocratic government.
(1) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
N95 – Filters at least 95% of airborne particles. Not resistant to oil.
Surgical N95 – A NIOSH-approved N95 respirator that has also been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a surgical mask.
N99 – Filters at least 99% of airborne particles. Not resistant to oil.
N100 – Filters at least 99.97% of airborne particles. Not resistant to oil.
R95 – Filters at least 95% of airborne particles. Somewhat resistant to oil.
P95 – Filters at least 95% of airborne particles. Strongly resistant to oil.
P99 – Filters at least 99% of airborne particles. Strongly resistant to oil.
P100 – Filters at least 99.97% of airborne particles. Strongly resistant to oil.
Additionally, see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-42/part-84
Vent makes it extremely comfortable, no glass fog etc. Then they said the vent somehow was bad for others, but let others wear cloth masks. That made no sense, the vent is a hard stop and then exhalation goes towards ground. There are still plenty of people who think / lecture about a vent being bad.
And the lists goes on.
I had a friend who was a doctor who did an N95 + face shield and did not catch covid for months treating covid patients, so I do have some faith in N95.
If the vent allows for more aerosols than a closed surgical mask, then the vent is worse for the people around you. It's not really relevant where the vent is in the mask. But whether the difference is significant enough to cause a problem, I don't know.
This is still obviously equal to or better than 90% of the masks I see people wearing (surgical / cloth etc).
It is absolutely fascinating.
And that does not even begin to discuss how easy local party representatives make it to run in IL.
It's a vicious cycle, but a virtuous cycle would also work in the same way. Reality shapes people's expectations, and people's expectations shape reality.
To improve society.
> And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?
They were never trustworthy to begin with if they do that.
Trustworthy does not mean "acts to benefit themselves over others at every opportunity".
I've been in religious circles where it's very important to defend the idea that once you believe, you're saved. But there's a darker side to that idea, because in order to maintain belief in the face of someone doubting and leaving the faith, everyone in the faith explains it away with "Oh, they never Really Believed in the first place."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
> To improve society.
Is gaining power the most efficient way for a trustworthy and ethically constrained person to improve society? Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.
[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
I don't know, I doubt anybody really knows. I suspect it would highly depend on the individual and the circumstance they find themselves in. Either way people do things that are not "the most efficient" all the time in all areas of their lives.
> Keep in mind that if you answer that question "yes", you need to believe that attempting to gain power and use it ethically and responsibly is more effective at helping people than trying to earn a bunch of money and throwing it at GiveWell's top charities[1], after adjusting for chance of success, which is a pretty high bar to clear.
I don't answer yes. I think a lot of charity work has pretty dismal results in improving society at a large scale to be honest, but that's another story. In any case it's quite possible to do both. Most political offices come with a salary.
I find it unlikely that attempting to optimize somewhat for both effective charitable contributions and climbing the political ladder is likely to result in better outcomes than focusing your full attention on either goal individually. (Also r.e. charity work frequently having dismal results, that is why I specified "givewell's top picks" not "The Foundation for Curing Rare Cancers in Cute Puppies").
I do think that there probably are cases where your best bet for causing the change you want to see is going into politics, but I don't think that politics are high enough value that just being a generically ethical person trying to climb the ladder will have a sufficient positive impact to make it a better course of action than the alternatives.
Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of climbing that ladder though, or underestimating the potential for change.
A trustworthy person might want to run for political office because they want to improve society with the power of that ofice. This is not up for debate. Certainly not by asking weird rhetorical questions. If you really want to argue the point then cough up a complete and coherent argument.
It is far harder now to control the flow of information, as some Middle Eastern leaders discovered in 2011, and a short while later the various democracies of the world.
Consider a little the meaning of us having such a discussion here on HN.
Part of the problem is bad grouping. I trust some politicians, and some business leaders on some topics.
But it's too easy to raise your idols on pedestals where they can do no wrong and you trust them on everything. (Conversely, of vilifying an entire class)
I've watched it happen to a significant proportion of the US population. Ironically, in those cases I've personally observed, it actually started from a distrust of the "establishment".
We used to trust that the large news organisations were somewhat self-correcting and accountable. The New York Times, Washington post, Wall st Journal, CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, etc.
After the total lack of accountability for Iraq and WMD, for 2 decades of Afghanistan, The Russiagate debacle and you can add a hundred things you've seen clearly yourself to this list. Trusting these news organisations is pathologically insane. They're clearly very happy to fabricate, to repeat and amplify pure propaganda with no evidence as fact and pretend it never happened or we were all in it together as though readers/watchers being duped are the real problem.
This is the trust that changed. Lies "for the greater good" have a huge interest rate when the bill comes due.
Nobody was ever inclined to really trust Trump, or Clinton or Bush or Obama or Biden any more than Nixon. Why would you? They're politicians. We trusted the limits on their power and the idea that there was corrective feedback on the system somewhere.
We used to think we wouldn't be subject to pravda levels of lies from our "diverse" media sources. Maybe we were terribly naive when we thought that. Now we know there are true stories, well reported in the Times and the Journal for example but you can't assume that about any given story, especially if it affects military funding either directly or indirectly.
All the WMD pushing assholes appear to be back pushing the next war and again if you think that going to war is not such a great idea given the last few unmitigated disasters you clearly are carrying water for Bin Laden, I mean Saddam, I mean the Taliban, I mean Assad, I mean PUTIN!
Trump (damn him) wanted out of Afghanistan like the majority of Americans. Suddenly there's a totally false story, usually fabricated that he's ignoring PUTIN's bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan to swing public opinion against the steps to get out.
Biden (let's go) agrees 100% with Trump and American voters that 20 years and 3 trillion is enough and continues Trump's work and gets out. The tone of reporting changes immediately and his popularity plummets.
Nobody "trusted" Biden.
Nobody "trusted" Trump.
Now many, many more of us from all political persuasions are very suspicious of the negative feedback mechanism to keep them in check because it has been abused so very, very badly.
Nothing like providing the raw footage and source documents to de-spin. Anyone doing that is the real focus of censorship.
And we should keep it that way! These individuals objectives are not aligned with those of Joe & Jill Everyman.
There is another kind of trust that has been greatly damaged at considerable cost. The trust of the corrective mechanisms we use to keep the powerful (who we never have nor ever will trust) in check.
Starting with every large news source, journalist and pundit who cheered for the Iraq war and WMD to do a full and proper account of how they were used to dupe their readers and what they learned from it.
The next war is WMD with the same lying assholes cheering for it. And the one after that. The war machine is simply the most obvious and irrefutable case of it. 20 years and 3 trillion in Afghanistan - lets up the military budget again Joe! Just like Donald did. With zero "how is this paid for?" stories. With zero. "Is this value for money?" stories. With zero resistance to being passed...
Note that if the case for ever more military funding is strong, these questions can be asked, answered and debated thoroughly in the media. and by elected officials? So why aren't they?
Substack is just another primitive blog platform, with a little 'pay' button attached, nothing more.
It reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about black folks bragging about not going to jail, selling drugs, cheating on their wives or having multiple baby mamas. You're not supposed to do any of those things, you dumb muthafaka!
However, this newly engorged and incestuous relationship between big Government, Big Media, and Big Tech, engaging in rampant deplatforming and counter-narrative suppression, is a civil liberties disaster of epic proportions.
Outside of a few brief moments in history where sanity broke out, this is usually not the case.
> Now we live in a time where people who make the most money make the decisions on how things should be.
This is the default. Substitute "have the most wealth" for "make the most money" and it's about perfect.
I hope substack can really change the game here because their business model delivers content you paid to receive rather than competing for your attention. More on that here: https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati...
If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it's that both "free speech" and censorship can be weaponised by those in power who wish to manipulate the discourse for their own personal gain.
If we want regular folks to have a greater say in public discourse again, we need to strike a balance that limits the use of both sides as tools of oppression.
I'd personally be in favour of fines or other punishments for deliberately or negligently propagating misinformation, assuming that the decision was made by a jury and not an unelected body.
Want to know how we should combat misinformation? Education.
I think the above alteration throws the dilemma into a little sharper relief.
We live in a complex society which requires a degree of deference to "expert authority" in order to function. Our collective ability to agree on how to determine who (or what) qualifies as such an authority is not working well. I do not have any answers in which I am confident, just Socrates line on the beginning of wisdom.
Socrates who was censored by being executed because he said things the authorities of the time didn't like? That Socrates?
The tech community certainly wasn't immune to the craziness of the times.
If we are allowed to discuss and compare the merits of various theories, the wheat of truth naturally separates from the chaff of nonsense. When everything outside of The Approved Narrative is censored, people inevitably stumble across "banned" ideas - but there's no one to argue the other side or point out the flaws, making it far too easy to get sucked in.
Moderation I can live with. If some mod doesn't want me on their sub, I find another. It's the admin hammer bans of the subs I found that I object to.
Huh? Just because they pay nothing for it doesn't mean it isn't outsourced. It's totally outsourced.
Maybe it's because I run a few websites off of a machine in my basement, and those are where I say the things I want to say. If another website wants to ban me then fuck 'em I'll say what I want from my own IP/domain. I have never felt particularly entitled to say whatever I want on other people's in-house implementations of vbulletin. I understand that platforms are different, and commented elsewhere on that stuff, but <img src="old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg">
The lately famous /r/antiwork just had a moment. I tried to find the post where they were banning every dissenting opinion, but the thread got locked. Now the entire subreddit is locked. For reference here's a link to another subreddit locking a thread because the /r/antiwork mod got offended:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cringetopia/comments/sd5cvd/banned_...
This was all because the mod couldn't handle the criticisms he took for being interviewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc
This worked fine with smaller communities and the ability for competition when moderators overstep their mandate and make their communities a bad place. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this is all failing.
1. Reddit management has made their political leanings clear: if you are conservative, you are unwelcome. When I say "conservative" I'm not referring to the far-right. I'm referring to mainstream conservatism about family values, hard work, religion, etc. No example could better encapsulate their position than their "Anti-Evil Operations" team, which bans people for any and all reasons, including unpalatable political positions. Admins/staff on this team have been quite candid about their desire to ban conservative views. This aligns well with Reddit's announced IPO. Sanitising discussion to be advertiser friendly will help their bottom line.
2. The user base leans heavily left. It seems certain large websites have a theme now. When one considers the kinds of discussion which happen on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we all know which way those sites lean. Reddit is pretty hard left now. For example, the /r/Science subreddit is 24/7 "Study finds Trump voters have low IQ." The Joe Rogan fun subreddit is 24/7 "Does anyone else think Joe Rogan is Hitler?" There is zero space for nuanced discussion except in some very niche subreddits, and they are all inevitably taken over by a power mod who purges nuanced discussion.
3. The anonymous mod system is just not equipped to deal with tens of millions of users in a single subreddit. The top mod is the dictator, and they always end up enforcing their biases on the sub; overtly and subtly. This is exacerbated because of...
4. Subreddit squatting. A perfect example of this are the country name subreddits. Everyone from said country new to Reddit subscribes to these subs. They are all cheerleaders for a particular political party within each country. If you don't like that political party, you're marginalised and usually banned. It's not as simple as creating a competing country subreddit because few people will ever find it. No one thinks to search for "TrueCanada" if they're looking for "Canada." Of course, the the original subreddit automatically removes any mention of the competing sub, and bans anyone discussing it.
There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail. IMHO, Reddit is ready for a Digg-style exodus. People are just waiting for a clear alternative.
That really blew up in their face didn't it? 12 hours by the way is probably a low ballpark by the way. In my mind the power mods compulsively play Reddit like World of Warcraft addicts gearing up on a 7-day no shower session, going around silencing and ban-hammering users they dont like. I don't have the link but someone posted statistics of the top "players" in these communities, and it approaches something like making a post/comment/edit about every 6 minutes of being awake, or something equally ridiculous.
> There are just too many issues to discuss them all, or in much detail.
Couldn't agree more. Someone could probably write a thesis on the devolution of social media companies. I might be crazy but I see a pattern here. If it didn't have so much political implications I wouldn't care what a website here or there does, but it clearly has implications on real life.
For most people, to host a blog, one can host a server at their house, through their own ISP, use the latest static website package, and share some links. It is a very low barrier to entry.
I think what people are actually saying is that they want the followers that these platforms provide them. They want to be able to push notifications and invade peoples' inboxes. They want entry into their day-to-day. You can't get that from your own host.
When I go to a doctor, chances are he will prescribe me some drugs. Why? because thats what they're trained to do, rewarded for doing, and punished for not doing. If I go a mechanic, and ask him for a couch, he will probably offer me the back seat. If I ask my teacher, they'll tell me study hard and do my homework.
There's a good chance I neither want or need pills, or a backseat couch, or do homework all afternoon. This might be their best professional advice. But ultimately, I have to use my own judgment to assess risk and benefit since I have to live with consequences.
This is now somehow bad, and we're supposed throw out personal autonomy, and trust experts, newscasters and so on. But this has not worked out in the past, especially when there's coercion involved. By complying you're only empowering these people.
The antidote is to assert individual rights and especially freedom of speech. Build parallel societies. And ridicule the authoritarians.
I’m confused are experts good or bad or are we just supposed to castigate all of them since random people on the internet know better.
I’d rather an internet mob doesn’t decide the legitimacy of respecting experts especially when showing such an ignorance of other instances in the past when society at large turned on experts.
How do you apply your personal autonomy to a domain you know nothing about? In fact, how do you even figure out you don't know enough about something to make a good judgement?
You might not need pills, but what if you do? Your personal judgement, made from a position of more or less total ignorance, is going to be wrong. In that case fine, your condition gets worse and has serious consequences, it's your choice I guess.
But when it comes to public health measures, and particularly contagious diseases, you're making the decision for other people too. Is your ignorant autonomy more important than other people's lives?
These are not easy questions, and I'm not proposing specific answers here, but "use your own judgement" isn't a panacea, especially when other people have to live (or die) with the fallout.
Mostly because the experts don't care about you and don't have the time to care about you. What trust can people have in doctors if they treat people like ATMs? My partner went to one of her doctors and he prescribed her a vaccine (not COVID or anything like that) for something that's more of nuisance than anything else. She wanted to take it but checked about it first. She also has an autoimmune disease. Turns out, even though her autoimmune disease is in her file, the doctor didn't even read the file and prescribed her a vaccine that should never be prescribed to someone with that particular AI disease. So yeah, talk about good judgement and trusting "experts".
That erodes trust. You have people you know (or think you know) online who say really out-there positions. You either adjust your position, or you don't. Either way, you now have to distrust people you trusted before. (And, I suppose, me saying this reduces trust, too - how many of the people I respect online are actively sowing disinformation? How many are unknowingly passing it on?)
Then there's domestic disinformation. Both political parties (and their satellites) at least. Conservative and liberal think-tanks. (Don't kid yourself that only the other side does it.)
You could even consider regular commercial advertising to be disinformation, though I wouldn't go that far. But big corporations do engage in disinformation - think about the tobacco companies and "no, smoking doesn't cause cancer".
It's really hard to trust when people are actively, deliberately lying to you for their own advantage.
Content moderation is when you determine what is published on your platform. Censorship is when someone else tells you want can be published on your platform.
Substack is probably making the right business decision, but the claim in this article is completely backwarrds.
Trust 100% requires content moderation. Good scientific journals are trusted because they exercise extremely tight control over what gets published. Good news sources are trusted because they moderate content and exercise strict editorial control. Facebook is a untrusted cesspool of misinformation specifically because they moderate so lightly.
The idea that trust comes from lack of content moderation or editorial control is logically and empirically wrong.
Editorial endorsement and evaluation of content can be entirely decoupled from publishing. This is what "overlay journals" based on repositories like ArXiV do: they provide independent endorsement of papers published elsewhere.