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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
"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]
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The funny thing is that everyone commenting here thinks that we're headed towards an authoritarian nightmare, but for different reasons.
It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I'm reminded of this amazing review by George Orwell:
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
When we're afraid, we give power to politicians that promise deal with it swiftly. Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking. Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it.
Has the war on terror stopped? No? When do we get to hop onto a plane without undressing ourselves?
Oh, but now there's a war against viruses? So you have to undress yourself and take a shot.
Next, there will be a war on climate change. You'll have to undress yourself, take a shot, and prove that you only took public transit to the airport, and that you haven't eaten beef for 48 hours prior because it leads to more gas from farts, which is bad for the environment.
When the next financial crisis hits (and it hasn't yet), and a large number of middle class people get wiped out again, there will be legislation to protect retail investors from the volatility of the stork market. You must go to a certified and licensed financial professional for your wealth planning.
The appropriate politician from the left or right will run for office and get voted in because when most people fear something, they vote against freedom.
The difference is that terrorism in the US is a miniscule threat in reality, killing a handful of people a year, whereas the virus is one of the top causes of death over the past two years. Not all fears are unjustified. Climate change already kills far more people annually than terrorism via floods, fires, and droughts. That being said, fear doesn't justify authoritarianism, even when the fear is reasonable.
Similarly, the individual chance of getting cancer by smoking a cigarette doesn't warrant fear. But if you apply this logic to cigarette after cigarette, you may end up in a PSA talking through a hole in your throat and telling everyone not to smoke. Fortunately, as human beings, we can see patterns in large numbers and act on them. We aren't limited to looking at the world through the keyhole of individual risk. We can take a broader view.
I think your system is not an accurate representation. They are talking about an individuals risk of these events killing them. Your system is talking about the cumulative risk of individual cigarettes. This distinction needs to be made because the risk varies greatly by location and ones preparation (mitigating factors).
My 'system' is talking about incremental risks, whether they are across time or across individuals. The point is that these incremental risks are not great in themselves, but when accumulated, they become substantial. If climate change contributes to increasing disease, as is projected, the cumulation of diseases over time become a substantial risk even to the individual, even if they aren't directly affected by flood, fire or drought. And of course even a low direct individual risk can cascade into a societal risk that circles back to affect the individual. Take the chief risk of COVID-19, which is that the local medical system is overwhelmed. When this becomes acute, as it did in Italy, it affects even those who were at little risk of COVID itself, by denying them access to health care in the event of an accident or other illness.
Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population. The infectious diseases they talk about are from expansion of the disease carrier range (mosquitoes and ticks). These have mitigating factors to avoid the infections. There's very little cumulative risk and it's still largely location based.
So this is a far cry from your example of cigarettes and ending up in a PSA. The risk is much higher with cigarettes. As stated by the previous commenter - they are not something to be afraid of.
> Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population.
You're looking at it through the individual lens again. The chances of an individual winning the lottery in any year are near zero, but the chances of there being some lottery winner in any year are near 100%. The chance of any one car trip resulting in an accident are extremely low, yet we still wear a seat belt consistently because the long term chances of an accident are high even if we are careful drivers---we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint. And the cigarette example, which is only a "far cry" if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change.
Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real. And of course those aren't the only climate related risks. Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate.
"You're looking at it through the individual lens again."
The entire point of this thread - that individuals shouldn't fear these things. Fear is at the individual level.
"we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint."
Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear. Even then, the occurrence of an accident when being careful is low enough that there is not fear when driving down the road. If there was substantial fear, then we wouldn't drive (like people I know who have a panic attack when driving).
"if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change."
They have yet to be fully disclosed/known and materialize. It's reasonable to not be afraid of something that does not yet exist.
"Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real."
It's not hand waving. There are mitigating steps to be taken. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of for many people. Again, the component of the comment we are discussing.
"Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate."
It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you. These things do not affect all areas. You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them. I'm not afraid of those events as they largely don't affect my area, and I take steps to mitigate any damage from the ones rest do occur.
I think the basic problem here is that you attach strong negative connotations to the word "fear". But fear is useful to us, as in the seatbelt example:
> Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear.
My point was that we wear the seat belt because we fear having an accident without it. Just as we take mitigating actions against disease because we fear facing the disease without them.
> It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you.
Sure, if it truly does not and could not affect you. But global warming can affect every person on the planet. There is virtually nowhere that is immune to all of the direct and indirect effects. And even if there were such a place, human beings are interconnected economically and socially, so that if something negatively impacts people in one place, it can indirectly and negatively affect people elsewhere.
> You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them.
Why would you work to mitigate something that was completely benign? You do it because you fear the possible consequences of not mitigating, the same reason you wear a seat belt. It is exactly this entirely rational fear that public officials use to justify mitigating global warming, the well-founded fear that if we don't, it will potentially cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
Fear is an emotional motivation, and can be a cause for taking on the seatbelt. There are also logical motivations, such as the realization that I will be less injured if I have a seatbelt and an accident happens.
It’s not that the action of using a seatbelt is different, but my reason for doing that can be very different. This can also apply to Covid and other risk mitigation. And emotional motivations usually affects us humans more strongly than logical ones, so using them is good when you want to motivate more drastic actions. So most overreaches are motivated by emotional arguments, such as fear. Because of that it’s good to be skeptical about such arguments.
People don't wear seat belts because they've thought to themselves, "I could be injured and therefore less capable if I don't wear a seat belt." They wear a seat belt because they (very rationally) fear death or serious injury. It's interesting that some folks have such a stigma about admitting fear, though. It's like the people who insist that advertising has no effect on them, just all those other weaklings.
Absolutely right. However, it doesn't stop politicial groups or media from using ominous music and dystopian or wasteland images to evoke fear in their audience.
That’s a gross oversimplification of climate change.
You have people dying because crops can’t survive.. people dying because they got misplaced on coastal areas .. people dying because of extreme heat.. people dying on fires …
And that without counting that freeze to death due to extreme cold.. which climate change also causes
> Overall, a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates.
It's a bit hard to prove who died due to the flood/etc being affect by climate change as opposed to if they'd have died if the flood was less. But I'm not sure ~500/yr is a good number to bet against.
I think fear can do a lot of things, as you say, the loss of freedom. I also think the lack of fear can lead to the loss of freedom. Fear can help us temper our actions so we don't do things that end up hurting us severely or even killing us.
That being said, I would agree that repressed fear can do us quite a bit of harm and I think it often happens because we'll say fear is bad, without just appreciating how it hurts and helps.
Only if the lack of fear is because an authority figure has managed it all for you. This creates the bigger problem of a lack of self-regulation and automatic trust in authority.
This illustrates perfectly the false axis of the idea of right vs left outside of economic spheres (and labor vs capital is more accurate than left vs right in the economic realm).
The spectrum of totalitarianism vs anarchy is a much better axis to use with regards to this topic, IMO. In that light, it is easy to see that all of the post-9/11 fear-mongering and the COVID fear-mongering are run with the same agenda: more restrictions, less freedom.
Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.
Back in the 60s-80s, the world managed to use the fear of pox to eradicate the disease from existence - and most did so by instituting a vaccine mandate.
Back in the late 70s/80s, the world managed to use the fear of acid rain to ban sulphur emissions (LRTAP convention). In the early 90s, the world managed to use the fear of ozone to ban CFC gas usage.
Back in the Cold War, both major superpowers were too afraid of the other one to launch nuclear weapons to initiate direct warfare, and in the end the fear of global warfare led to comprehensive international agreements on reducing arms proliferation.
The difference is: back then, politicians did the right thing to do based on scientific evidence and indications of issues. These days?! Scientists and activists have warned for decades about the dangers of climate change and the urgency to do something... but until now, all we got is politicians waffling around instead of actually doing anything to combat the real problems we are going to face.
Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful
Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration. Fear of sailing into the unknown is also what kept Europeans in the dark about the American continent for centuries.
What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN? Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments with it?
Overcoming fear drives progress (but it is by no means the only driver). Giving in to fear just leads to regression.
> Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration.
For many problems, the longer you let them sit around the worse they become. Linearly accelerating problems, yeah, you can usually get by with sitting them out.
But exponentially accelerating problems (climate change, infectious agents, consumer debt) require immediate and harsh response, otherwise they become so much more difficult to resolve. The key issue is that most people lack the basic education to understand exponential functions, even after two years of a pandemic.
> What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN?
None.
> Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments?
Indeed, but that one was a "false equivalency" media issue. Crackpots got a lot of media presence despite their claims being outright invalid from the start or being absolute niche opinions, simply because their unfounded fear brought in a lot of clicks from an ignorant and uneducated public.
Coincidentally or not, we have seen the same media issues in the COVID crisis, particularly with Fox "News"/OAN/"News"max in the US or the Axel Springer/Murdoch tabloids in Europe.
Fear and logic can look the same from the outside when logic dictates caution. Do you "fear" fire? You understand it, and know what you can and cannot do with it. Yet your aversion to ever letting it exist outside of very tight controlled scenarios, and perhaps panic if you saw it spreading uncontrollably quickly, would look an awful lot like fear to somebody who didn't understand what fire was.
I think the main difference is that fear is an emotional response. And this important because emotions can often misguide us are also easily exploited. For instance, racism is often a product of fear. People see some group of people engaging in crime at a higher rate than usual, and start to fear all people of this group as criminals even when that fear and prejudice is completely unjustified. And tyrants since time immemorial have used "fear the other group" as a rallying cry for self righteous horrible acts in the name of a better tomorrow that never comes.
So in your examples is it primarily fear driving behaviors, or primarily logic/rationality?
> Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.
this is critically underrated. dismissing ths current feardriven environment really misses the issue.
what is new now is not fear, but the communication - the market penetration. sowing dissent used to be the game of spies. now any political enemy, foreign and domestic, just has to tweet or facebook.
> However, one thing I must point out is that climate change is a complex problem with no easy solutions.
Indeed, but right now we are doing almost nothing meaningful. We shame people from taking vacation flights once every couple years but don't ban short distance "business flights" for corporate executives with a completely bonkers view on how important they are. We still don't mandate the end of "bunker fuel" burning on ships or the usage of land-line power of cruise ships. Instead of building electrified freight and passenger rail, large parts of the rail network run on decades old diesel engines, large parts of freight runs on trucks and in the US the word "high speed passenger rail" is as inconceivable as "fair minimum wage".
One again I agree with most of what you're suggesting here. One more point of nuance though.
What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight? Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once? How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?
The first motor car was in 1886, over 130 years ago.
The first mass produced motor car was 1908, Over 110 years ago.
We've built this current system for over 100 years. Rebuilding a new one may also take a similar time line. The tragedy is we may not be able to BUT... you are right.
> What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight?
You don't need to replace the rails, only add overhead power. Which, granted, isn't free in terms of CO2, but saves a lot of fossil fuel emissions and particulate matter emissions for those living adjacent to rail routes (which is mostly poor people, so this issue also has a social impact) down the roat.
> Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once?
The US spends more on their military than the next 7-11 (depending on which source you want to cite) countries combined. The US spends twice as much per person for healthcare than European countries, with worse results.
There are way more than enough ways to fund a transportation revolution, and in the worst case the US Government can issue special ear-marked bonds.
> How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?
Two to three decades. Which coincidentally lines up with the predictions on when climate change will hit the "irreversibility" point.
A rant like this makes me ask; can we do much better? Want if this is about as good as human cooperation gets?
A rant like this has only one answer, and it’s for society to stop trying. The ranter fails to grapple with details, matters of fact, and reality in general. The ranter is overwhelmed.
While the right certainly had their fear based issues before the pandemic, it’s a bit of a stretch to say the left didn’t.
Trump was going to become a dictator. We had 12 years to go living on earth 4 years ago. Apparently almost everyone is a white supremacist… I could go on.
Why didn’t Obama revoke the patriot act if he was so on the side of non fear? Or allow more whistleblowing.
Media hyperbole aside especially when it comes to US conservative coverage... we still didn't get anywhere close to the measures climate scientists wish we took and we're still chugging onwards with a very slow increase in average temperatures which are in line if not above what was predicted
European perspective here: Trump was definitely trying to make himself a dictator, just look at how he handled losing an election. Please don’t vote him in again America.
He was handed a global pandemic in which it was completely permissible for leaders to take on unprecedented, unlimited emergency powers, and yet he did nothing. He was actually criticized for not using his emergency powers to implement an (unconstitutional) national lockdown. If his true goal was to become a dictator, why did he do nothing when he was given the perfect opportunity?
He made no difference between himself and the state. Used the AG as his personal lawyer. Used his position to secure personal business dealings. And then tried to orchestrate a coup when he lost.
He’s not literally the devil but he’s both so incompetent and corrupt that I’m frankly baffled there is such fervent support for him.
If you read American leftist media from late 2020 to January 2021 you'll find a bunch of breathless editorials claiming that Trump was about to declare martial law and assume dictatorial powers. That was obviously nonsense and displayed a complete lack of knowledge about how the US federal government and military work.
It's lack of trust more than a lack of knowledge. See: the submission title.
I can see how this perspective seems reasonable if you've never been on the boot-end of unjust laws, but a lot of us over here on the left side of the center have good reason to doubt that the good parts of law and order can hold up against a sufficiently inspiring and intelligent dictator. Trump was a fool and squandered what he had. Someone will run with what he built and fumbled in the same way Obama ran with what Howard Dean built and fumbled.
This is actually why I'm wary of calls to abolish the Senate and Supreme Court. They suck when you want to get stuff done, but they also give us time to organize against people who want to install a dictatorship. Our tar pit of a system and people at high levels believing in it was the only thing that stood between Trump and the genocide he'd love to give large parts of his base.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Clinton conceded right away and notably did not urge her supporters to storm the Capitol to “rectify” the results.
And regarding governors, recall that most of the swing states were under republican control.
Edit: I noticed now you gave the Russian connection as the example.
Russian interference was indeed the case.
Many people were angry at that but there’s an important difference between being angry at it and saying the Russians “stole” the election as in “had undue influence”, versus just pretending the result was rigged and you actually won an election you lost. That was something Trump did and it undermines the democracy you build your country on.
On the question of collusion the Muller report is quite informing but he explicitly didn’t want to say anything on the matter and left that to Congress.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Clinton is not a populist, she part of the establishment, her method of subversion was and is through the institutions themselves, i.e using the media, and the deep state to do the work not the people. Her power base is not the common man or woman.
As to the republican governors, you seem to have confused me with a republican, I am not a supporter of either side of the uniparty coin. I am an actual anti-establishment type, not one that is only anti-establishment when my "tribe" is not in power, or when the "other side" of the uniparty is in power. I am anti-estblishment 24/7, no matter if it is republican or democrat
I was no fan of Trump, never voted for him infact (nor Clinton or biden, or obama, or bush, or ....)
I don’t disagree that Clinton is as establishment as it gets and there were a lot of reasons to not want her in office.
I’m just triggered by the false equivalency, because unlikeable elite as she may be, her politics are more like treatable cancer for democracy whereas Trumps is like acute lead poisoning.
The reason I mentioned the republican governors wasn’t to suggest you were a member, rather to suggest that if we did think those states performed election fraud then we’d expect it to be in favour of the Republican Party, right?
Regardless of all that I hope you have a great weekend :)
If the left really got power we would all get a month paid vacation so we could actually afford to stock up and stay home while the virus dies off. The left is not in any way empowered in this country.
By "all" do you also mean healthcare workers? Law enforcement? Farmers? Military? Utility workers? Garbage collectors? Homeless people?
Even if you somehow locked all the humans in their homes for a month, someone would catch the virus again from a deer or something and the pandemic would start all over again.
The actual point seems to stand. Left, right, center. All have ill-advised proposals. Some are more willing than others to put their ideas on the table and take feedback (not blanket dismissals).
There hasn't been anyone remotely leftist in power for most of a century, so it's plainly inaccurate for /u/givemeethekeys to say:
>> "Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it."
Biden is, at best, a status quo maintainer in a deeply right-ratcheted[0] status quo.
This is the unfortunate side-effect when social and political signifiers become snarl words. I haven't done a science on it, but it seems like most people who use "left" sans detail and don't consider themselves leftist bundle DNC, DSA, and all the other center-left factions into one and imagine them being led by whoever the current DNC leader or president is.
I double checked /u/givemeethekeys' post and it's hard to pin down a definition. They mostly seem to want to accuse Biden of being a Republican while also insinuating he's a leftist, so their whole analysis is deeply confused (or confusing as presented).
Given the existence of animal reservoirs, short-lived immunity, asymptomatic carriers, continued transmission after vaccination, and the genetic instability of SARS-CoV-2, this seems like an incredibly naive view.
The only virus we've been able to eradicate — smallpox — was a VERY different beast because it had none of the issues listed above.
Hi there - it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle for a long time now. I had to go back 2 years to find anything else! That's not a legit use of HN, regardless of what your positions are, because it's not in keeping with the intellectual curiosity this site is supposed to be for. In fact, it's destructive of it. For that reason, we ban accounts that are using the site this way. I don't want to ban you, so could you please fix this?
Further explanations are at these links if anyone wants more:
We've spent trillions on all kinds of naive nonsense. What's the worst that could happen, people get a month off and the line goes up thanks to all the stimulus? Oh, the horror.
Mindless cynicism is not the virtuous alternative to optimism. We can do nothing and watch as our health care system continues to collapse or do something. Maybe this isn't it, but you haven't offered a better idea.
It's easy to tear people down for standing up to make a suggestion.
Not all ideas are worth pursuing. Continuing as-is most of the time (like 99.99%) is the appropriate choice. Do you move every time a stranger on TV/street suggests that?
Continuing as-is will mean the nearly full ICU beds will fill up and the already overwhelmed and too-short supply of medical professionals will dry up as they seek other careers. Every doctor I know who hasn't quit is in or approaching a burnout.
The curve of deaths from omicron in the US is already above delta's peak in much less time. Do you imagine this will just pass by without completely overwhelming the health care system? It's too late to do anything for this strain, but I don't want to gamble on it being the last or worst.
"Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking."
Not exactly. I think this is an example of how different perspectives lead to fear being used to drive a law, because it has been used by both sides. Those who agree with the law believe the threat (fear) is enough to justify the law, and forget that it was fear that drove it in the first place, or downplay the fear element.
I realise this was a /rant, but it's still spectacularly misinformed and unhelpful.
If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing and this proves the left and right are both the same, then you're part of the problem.
This reads more like a smart person trying to rationalize their cognitive dissonance, when they know deep down they've found themselves on obviously the morally and factually wrong side of an argument and see no way to retreat while maintaining face.
Yours seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation compared to my reading; I didn't hear them saying D == R so much as both are susceptible to the same flaw of human nature: impulsive overreaction to stimuli we find threatening.
I do agree that's an unhelpful analysis, but only because it happens to be tautological.
Neither the left or the right is arguing that climate change or COVID does not exist. The loud disagreements is about what strategy to deploy. We have nations like Germany that want to use natural gas to combat climate change, and we got France that want to use nuclear. The left leans towards natural gas, the right towards nuclear, both arguing that their strategy will lead towards an end to climate change and that the other side won't. Should vegetarian diet be part of our cultural diet, insects meal, blue agriculture, or should we focus our climate change priority on energy, transportation, heating, industry, futuristic technology and so on.
With COVID we have had more strategy than can be reasonable described in a comment, some which the left favor and others that the right favors. Should we classify the Swedish strategy as "right" and the Danish strategy as "left"? Doctors all over the world disagree on what optimal treatment is and in the end it is the patient outcome that dictate who was right.
The issue is that politicians get voted in because people fear the bad outcome, not because people favor one strategy above an other strategy. Thus the perception from both sides is that the "other" side do not believe that the bad outcome exist.
This is a man elected to the US Senate in 1994. First elected to Cross in 1987. Still there today. Guess which political party he belongs to.
https://youtu.be/3E0a_60PMR8
Folks are literally about to be put on respirators denying they're sick from Covid. They're rarely if ever left wing.
https://youtu.be/WicsWfTm1ZI
So yeah, one side has the lion's share of denying climate change and Covid.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research which demographic has been promoting the consumption of urine as a protective measure against a respiratory and vascular disease-causing virus.
It may be popular to blame politicians, but people need to take responsibility for voting for folks that espouse belief in Jewish space lasers. Whether you think the politician is putting up a front or honestly believes what they're peddling really doesn't matter in the long run if you're filling in the box next to their name on the ballot.
In a global context, the number of people believing in Jewish space lasers is a poor excuse to implement global surveillance and censorship. I rather that each country where those people live in take care of their citizens with the health care that they need, or legal system if those people get violent. I suspect however that fear over people that believe in Jewish space lasers is out of proportion of the actually number and threat of such people.
Do you have any numbers of how large the demographic of Jewish space lasers believers are and the number of incident globally where they caused harm to society?
We're not talking about a global context. We're specifically talking about US politics.
Just one believer in Jewish space lasers elected to Congress is far too many, and we have notably more than one. All from the same US party. And then there's the state level, all from the same US party.
Random folks believing in crazy notions is worrisome but viewable as a marginal percentage of the population, but we're not talking about them.
We're talking about elected individuals with real power who vote on real laws that affect us all. Some of those Congresspeople believe in Jewish space lasers, and all of those delusional folks belong to the GOP.
We can discuss whether it is sanguine to have Congresspeople make stock trades with a clear conflict of interest/insider trading. We can argue about what the top marginal tax rate should be. We can debate the merits of expanding or contracting the social safety net as it regards health care or parental leave or pre-K education/day care.
We're talking about elected officials—and an associated constituency that either support them or don't consider it a deal-breaker—who believe in Jewish space lasers and Democratic pizza parlor child sex and mutilation dungeons.
You can scream "free speech" all you like, but if you cannot see the substantive difference, free speech will not save you.
I think your comment got an unfair downvote. The rant was okay, but it went on to talk about a strawman argument of a measure(beef consumption) before flying. However, the better I'd have put the whole rant(not sure OP agrees, this is just my reading of it), is like this:
We've been reactively forming policies out of fear of extreme bad/negative consequence events. Since, the time window of public/societal memory is limited and there's a cycle of elections and power structure climbing too involved, the policies tend to be ones that are sellable/explain-away-able to the vast majority of the public. And these become the standards till another event occurs and never re-considered.
"If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing "
I did not read it like this, but rather that all those topics are used by politicians in the same way. To generate fear, to control people. Neverending crisis. Neverending war. Rigid, emergency exemption laws for all eternity.
Very well described by Orwell in 1984 already.
And supplementing this rant: a very frustrating aspect of all this is these things are predictable at a high level.
* It is certain that in a given lifetime there will be some hostile act that causes hundreds to thousands of deaths.
* When you look at how quickly people can travel the world, it was pretty clear there were going to be some pretty horrific diseases this century. We're thankful that it wasn't Ebola.
* The climate has been a matter of crisis since biblical times.
* Financial markets are obviously healthy, deindustrialisation of advanced economies is a sign of sustainable progress, printing money then handing it out to asset owners has becoming the normal response because it has proven to work very well and isn't causing any social pressures at all (people voted for Trump only due to racism). So maybe the next financial crisis is unpredictable. Things seem pretty rosy in this department. No need to prepare.
Why humans are programmed to wait until midway through a crisis to start identifying the risks is a puzzler. The problems are very obvious unless people listen to mass media.
I was noticing that pattern as well, many people seem to be hurling the same insult but from opposite sides. In a way, it worries me, because the words lose their theoretical meaning and stand more for the assumed malevolence of the other side.
If I could wish one thing on the world at this moment it would be for us to realize that most of the people who we believe are attacking us don't actually believe that they are attacking us, just as they believe we are attacking them and we don't believe that we are.
Yep. I had this conversation with my daughter the other day. She was like "But ... they just think the same thing about what you're saying". I was like "Totally, the only difference is that I'm right, and they're wrong". She was like "how do you know?". That lead to a much longer session of reviewing types of biases and fallacies, the scientific method and various other critical thinking tools I've developed over the years, but whoever is on the "other side" is having the same conversation with their kids, and showing them tools and resources they've developed over the years to decide what information to trust and, to the kid, it's just as convincing!!
This was one of the videos we looked at, I think it's totally on point:
Lol exactly. This is why I try to remind myself to pay attention to how I and others may be feeling underneath, and have even dedicated my professional life to it, because I have honed very strong rationalizing skills.
I find often the people who disagree with me the strongest can also go toe-to-toe with me in finding stories and evidence that confirms our beliefs and if I remember (and have the courage), I try to go deeper to talk about how I'm feeling afraid of this, this, and this, angry about this and this, ashamed of this, and so on, and try to imagine how they might be feeling across those contexts, and more often than not, realize we're both two humans trying our best. But goodness I can avoid going there sometimes, and if I do get there, it can be after a long long discussion with someone, and sometimes one or both of us gives up before we get to that point.
What I find rampant these days is the rather extreme way of thinking “If you are not with me, you are against me.” And I think social media amplifies this, not only by algorithms, but also because text doesn’t provide good context (intonation, stance, emotional transference) , I mean we literally read other people’s thought in our own head, also those whose thoughts we are not congruent with.
HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.
Now with politics and politicians this a much harder pill to swallow, because their literal job these days is to stand on a soapbox, and we as the public have gotten rather used to it, and voting in those who do the soapbox act the best. This is also because in general it’s hard to choose politicians beyond the local who we can relate to, and be invested in beyond retoric.
I agree that much of the design of social media can contribute to this.
As much as I love this:
> HNs rules are great in this sense, to continuously seek out curious conversations instead of the rather solipsist tendency to soapbox.
I also just thought how HN may contribute to this through design. I'm replying to your post right now and I can only see your post on my screen. While I can click "parent" in the menu to see the chain of replies or "context" to see your post in the context of all the replies, I'm not able to see both a reply box and the context before your post on the same page.
So, it requires me to either keep in working memory what the parent said, and what the grandparent said and great grandparent, or maybe to have a multitabbed approach. Conversely, something like Discourse allows me to scroll up and down to see the previous posts while maintaining a compose window open.
Maybe this isn't the place for such a comment, I guess I just felt frustrated in another thread and worried I'd give a reply that either repeated what someone said before or didn't encapsulate the conversation.
I think these little details really matter in communication and how we often overlook them or discount them.
I agree, what seem like small design decisions can have great impact. I wonder if studies are being done on this. Something like About Face on interaction design, but then specifically on effective communication and discourse.
Ah, I imagine there are, as I remember back in 2006 or so at college, people started studying impacts of chats and such, however, I'm not specifically familiar with any research on it. If you come across it, I'd love to hear of it! Or if you do research and want some ideas / wanna partner on something, I'm also open to that. I don't have professional research background yet have worked on emotions and communications for almost 10 years now, and studied intercultural communication in college after switching from electrical engineering, so I'm quite fascinated by the intersection of computer-mediated communication and how it impacts us emotionally.
edit: Also, I'm not sure what you meant by "About Face," will you explain it more?
"but whoever is on the "other side" is having the same conversation with their kids, and showing them tools and resources they've developed over the years to decide what information to trust and, to the kid, it's just as convincing!!"
I wish. And sometimes they do.
But there are lots and lots of people who have various religious/ideological dogmas. They do not show their kid the scientific method - they preach their truth to them. Because they feel they are right.
It has helped me to realize that most of politics is preference, and preference rarely need be informed by the scientific method, especially when most of our daily choices are preference based.
E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc.
Our culture has now taught a few generations that people get to decide their own truth, and they conflate preference for truth, and now we are witnessing what this means…
"E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc."
Ok, my feelings of love are not guided by a scientific method (except analyzing and reflect on what I feel).
But by deciding what to wear, eat, watch etc. I do apply the scientific method. Meaning I test out systematically, what works best for me. And I try to teach this to my children.
The scientific method applied to preferences is probably not the scientific method (in regards to control experiments (unless you have clones and access to the multi verse:)))
The very basic idea of the scientific method as I learned it, is: testing ideas by experiment.
If it looks cold outside, but not too cold - I have the idea that a medium warm jacket of mine is enough. And then outside I see if it was adequate or not and next time under similar conditions I change accordingly, or go back to the house that instant.
Sounds like common sense and it is. But not everyone is doing it.
I seriously got shocked by people telling me, they walk in shoes hurting them, but they did so because of style. This sounds like insanity to me, even though I know in their specific setting it makes some sense - as style is important in their circles. But that just means those circles are far from science and rationality, if it leads to people wearing clothes not adequate for the weather and being cold and uncomfortable.
“ I seriously got shocked by people telling me, they walk in shoes hurting them, but they did so because of style.”
Determining what to optimize for is basically what preference is. Some prefer attractiveness and aesthetics over comfort, and in most cases there is no option that optimizes all variables due to complex cross talk…
After you choose which subjective preference to optimize for, you can definitely employ the scientific method to try to parse that further, but that comes after the preference:)
"After you choose which subjective preference to optimize for, you can definitely employ the scientific method to try to parse that further, but that comes after the preference:) "
I think I can apply the scientific method also to preferences. Meaning if it really makes me happy, to be accepted in certain circles where the conditions are bad shoes, then so be it.
But personally I decided years ago, that this is not the case for me.
Actually, wanting to be comfortable all the time is irrational. You should intentionally make yourself uncomfortable occasionally in order to avoid becoming too "precious". Hypothermia is an old friend of mine.
I don't think it's necessarily about them being right or wrong in the scientific sense. It's the communal disgrace that comes with having raised an apostate child. Being factually correct or incorrect is subordinate to communal standing.
This happens because there's a lot of cultural bias towards being centrist, being perceived as the reasonable middle. People like that a lot, it feels good, so whenever such people try to describe political disputes it's tempting to try and describe both parties as the same when arguably they're not.
This Substack article is a good case in point. It makes it sound like there's two sides, both demanding censorship, and Substack standing in the reasonable middle. But in reality they're only describing one side. They say:
"In the online Thunderdome, it is imperative that you are not seen to engage with ideas from the wrong group; on the contrary, you are expected to marshall whatever power is at your disposal – be it cultural, political, or technological – to silence their arguments"
Are both sides here trying to silence the other?
No. One side is and we've seen that a lot, hence why this post exists and that's partly why Substack has taken off. But the most "extreme" view promoted by sceptical Substackers on vaccines is that mandates are immoral and people should be free to decide, for various reasons. They aren't arguing that people promoting vaccines should be forcibly censored. At least I've never seen any such arguments, not even in comments.
"It’s [always] the other side who shuts down criticism because they know they can’t win the argument."
Is it? Again, people flagging red alerts over problematic COVID policies or data aren't trying to shut down criticism of themselves, in fact they routinely highlight and engage with it by writing long responses to people who disagree with them (knowing full well they'll never get a response).
In reality, one side here speaks but never listens whilst simultaneously working hard to ensure nobody is allowed to disagree with them. And the other side does not.
So whilst I applaud Substack's take, their framing of it is curious and maybe doesn't bode well. They aren't sitting in the middle here because there is no middle. There's one group that wants to wipe the others out completely and will use any tactics available to do so, and then there's Substack that's sheltering those people from the storm.
This seems to be the public perception: only one side demands censorship. This isn't quite true and only shows you how well one side is at publicizing that they're being censored, which, ironically, means they're censored -less-.
Palestinian accounts on facebook have been deleted for years when they were trying to report on occupation. Facebook also deleted all the accounts of Nicaraguan socialists trying to counter the Western narratives about their election. Anything on social media that is anti-imperialist, especially when it comes from the actual global south, has been silenced, and also silently silenced - because it' not part of the mainstream discourse, so people often don't realize it's gone because they never knew it was there to begin with. It was easy to quietly sweep under the rug.
The new right isn't so easy to quietly sweep under the rug, because it's loud and it's next door to many people in the West, so you notice when the posts are gone, people yell about it and call wolf - which means they have the voice to yell, and the power to cry wolf.
It's an old (very, very old) insight that rules for censorship are made with the the excesses of the right as legitimation for it, and then used against the left. Which is why, on the left, it would be pragmatically and strategically smart to stop clamoring for the censorship of the right. We're just handing the agents of control the tools to silence us with.
Well, I was using vaccines as an example because it's mentioned in the article (which appears to be prompted by some flak from the Guardian).
I don't know about Palestinians and Nicaraguan socialists. Are they demanding that their critics be silenced? I doubt they're in any position to even imagine demanding that.
"It's an old (very, very old) insight that rules for censorship are made with the excesses of the right as legitimation for it, and then used against the left."
Maybe it's old because it's no longer true? I'm approaching middle age now, and the best examples of right wing censorship I can think of are all related to sexual morals and porn. But at least in the UK left wing parties usually support censoring that stuff too, e.g. here's an old article about the current head of the UK Labour Party being concerned about internet porn and other Labour party figures supporting the idea of internet censorship:
If the left has ever been the side of free speech it must have been some time before I was born. I suspect the reality is that the people who want censorship are typically those in power or most aligned with power, and that swings back and forth over time.
> the best examples of right wing censorship I can think of are all related to sexual morals and porn
While those topics do come up for censorship here in the US, some people are also demanding to remove topics related to race and other interpretations of history, and sometimes for curse words.
For example, two trending topics in the US today are Dan Bongino getting kicked off YouTube and the book Maus being restricted/removed/relegated in a school district in Tennessee, and people complaining from both sides of being censored.
Parent seemed to not be talking about vaccines, but that censorship only was being applied to one "side."
So this comment was intentionally describing issues that are from different sides to point out that (A) it doesn't only happen to the "right," and (B) the fact that we hear about it so much from the "right" might actually be because they're censored less. Then (C) they describe that this is potentially even an intentional pattern used by more middle-leaning "left" to justify censorship against the "right" and then leverage against their own, more radical, side.
Not necessarily defending the idea, but comment seemed relevant to the parent, to me.
I would like to hear a long-form version that actually spells out your argument. I think we’re headed towards an authoritarian nightmare because politicians worldwide seem to be interested in tearing up the democratic process. Others seem to think we’re headed towards an authoritarian nightmare because YouTube takes down some videos. These things don’t seem comparable to me, but your comment makes me think I’m missing something important.
They're not comparable if you see YouTube as just a company. But you can look at it differently. It is also an organization with total authority over a widely used realm of global public discourse. It can use that power to determine what you hear and see, including both censorship and promotion via "the algorithm". It has massive economic and political influence. Careers are built on its platform, and it has effectively unlimited resources to manipulate politicians and effect policies to its benefit. All this, and it is 100% undemocratic, unresponsive in nearly every way to even those within the organization much less the greater public.
To be clear, governments turning away from even what is mostly limited representative democracy is very worrying. But it's also fair to worry about corporate power.
They’re interrelated - YouTube is an arm of the media industrial complex as much as the New York Times is. What it chooses to broadcast or not affects the public consciousness.
I think what you're missing is that social media companies are now essentially acting as government propaganda outlets and actively suppressing dissent. Some people believe that the current pandemic justifies suppressing "misinformation", but obviously once the government has that power they're going to use it for other purposes as well.
I think it largely comes from a lack of empathy that has been cultivated for a while now through the loss of social cohesion. It seems like across the board (families, friends, local communities, spouses etc), people are suffering socially and turn to insular groups on social media to cope.
Yeah, I think the only way out of this is empathy.
You don't have to think both sides are morally or rationally the same to have empathy for both sides. The alternative is either mass slaughter or mass displacement, at the extremes. You can't eliminate your "enemy" without either murdering/displacing them or somehow coming to terms with them (ideally, being friends with them). MLK got this right, and he was able to say this without compromising in one iota his stances on social justice, class justice, etc.
Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force. These days, such views can get you elected to US Presidency.
> Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Because it's easier to stop them believing that, if you understand why they're doing that in the first place. And understanding why they might believe that, is empathy.
Trick question, they will not have empathy for you either way.
The paradox of tolerance is not a novel idea, and people from Plato to Popper have chewed through it, and it is pretty much incontrovertible by now that the only way that a society can remain open and tolerant is to not tolerate intolerance.
> Why should one have empathy with people who deny other peoples' basic human rights simply because of their gender, sexual orientation or religion?
Because people disagree about factual matters all the time, and if you're just going to fight people who disagree with you, you'll be fighting literally everyone for the rest of your life, and a stable society might well become untenable.
> Back in 1939 the world decided they had enough of my ancestors (I'm German) and put a stop to bigotry by using force.
That's a pretty weird take. You think countries fought Germany because of its bigotry, and not because it was an aggressive expansionist regime that invaded them?
Hateful ideology without followers is just that: ideology to be forgotten in the dustbin of history.
It is one's own choice to believe in hateful ideology like racism, sexism or transphobia. No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology - therefore the focus and the blame should be on the people who willingly decide to believe hateful ideology (and, obviously, the spreaders of such ideology).
The US has been willing to go to war to fight the Nazi regime. For me, it is inconceivable how wide swaths of the US could have ended up with welcoming the successors of the Nazi ideology, not even a century later.
I am not saying responsibility does not exist. But no one lives in a vacuum. Everyone grows up in *an environment* they cannot choose for themselves, where one gets their beliefs and morality primed. Some are brainwashed one could say.
Still, they are people that should have compassion, that you can call onto.
> No one forces anyone to believe in any kind of ideology
I think you don't understand the common working of religious societies very well, or people in general that would not allow their beliefs to be questioned or think in absolutes.
People do not exist outside their circumstances. Being raised in religion/hateful worldview, without contact with outsiders and shunning doubtful members of group (alienating and shunning are really popular in such circles, in more or less vidible manner) doesn't give to many options in what to believe. Also, such ideas are not viewed as -isms inside such groups, they are often "fruit" of a whole tree of ideology and dogmas.
>The US has been willing to go to war to fight the Nazi regime. For me, it is inconceivable how wide swaths of the US could have ended up with welcoming the successors of the Nazi ideology, not even a century later.
The people who spent their early adulthood shooting at literal nazis generally held beliefs that would have the group you endorse in your profile calling them nazis today.
I'm not sure how you can call the current quibbling about race ethnicity "the successors of the Nazi ideology". Ignoring the "believes in literal superiority of one race" types who are a rounding error, most of the people getting called racist today say things that 1990s sociologists would have published without thinking twice.
Help me out. Watch Schindler's List (famous movie) and after, let us know if you still feel that, and in what ways how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance.
> how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance.
The guys in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us"? A Presidential candidate (and later President) openly mocking a disabled person on stage? Said President who sees immigrants as a threat and has no problem being backed by literal white supremacists, antisemites and KKK members? Who made first popularity with spreading the myth that Barack Obama was not a citizen of the US? Who openly called for the illegal locking up of a political opponent? Who disrespected the freedom of the press and the independence of the legislative and judicial branch that forms the pillar of a democratic society? Who invited if not outright ordered his backers to disrupt and prevent the orderly transition of power to his democratically elected successor? Who continually and baselessly accused vote fraud?
The Trump Presidency, its campaign and its voter base was and is filled with Nazi ideology at its core.
Still not seeing it. Nazis lined up people and shot them because of who they were. A literal economic machine was created to kill millions of people. But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
> Nazis lined up people and shot them because of who they were.
The Holocaust did not happen over night, it built upon years of dismantling the democracy of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis took power in 1933, the Holocaust began in 1941 - that's eight years.
> But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
The Nazi ideology was based upon declaring people unworthy of the right to live - and disabled people actually were murdered prior to the Jews ("Aktion T4" and others).
I'm not going to call Trump a full-blown Nazi, but the parallels between his Presidency and the years both prior and past 1933 are clearly present. Especially the part with fanatic supporters willing to commit murder and violence in the streets for their ideology. "Never again" especially means to prevent what led to the Holocaust in the first place.
I don't think empathy has anything to do with it, and I think that both-sidesing is one of the biggest challenges we face.
The trend that I see as most damaging is denialism as a mainstream philosophy. Denialism leads to distrust and fuels libertarinism, which, by it's very design, is a philosophy of decohesion.
The beginnings of my education on denial came from people fighting one of the largest denialist projects in history, but the strategies across all forms of denial are very similar. It's worth studying in-depth:
On the contrary, studies have shown that this comes from an excess of empathy. Studies have shown that when empathy is controlled chemically, increased empathy correlates positively to increased tribalism.
Personally I have major dystopian rhetoric fatigue and think thr answer is that they need to collectively shut the hell up about authoritarian nightmares. Not in a censorship way but a "You people are being paniced dumbasses again in a way completely unhelpful even if you were right, and the sooner this stupid zeitgeist ends just like the 'terrorists planning on hitting the remote Iowa small town petting zoo' the better!" way.
The construct has become a worse than useless intellectual trap in multiple ways.
1. It immediately catastrophizes with the favorite of bird cage liners everywhere, bad extrapolations taken uncritically as gospel.
2. Instead of clarifying as a common touchstone frame of reference it becomes dystopia definition creep that undermines the very notion of bad outcomes as things to be avoided. Satirically succicently summed up as "Oh no, having to get a job by applying online is being enslaved by technology! Having to buy groceries? Enslaved by corporations!" "Abundance of food supply? Oh no! Overpopulation and obesity!"
3. It leads to the uber-dumbness of accelerationism and being so stubbornly married to being right about bad outcomes they outright seek to cause the "inevitable" as twisted vindication. It is doomsday prognostication but even stupider. Notably accelerationists have always been wrong about their "inevitable". The Manson family's "Helter Skelter" and dumbass idea of an apocalyptic race war.
What should be done instead of dystopianizing? Point out the actual non-remote hypothetical bad effects and the situation for why it is likely. "Counter situations" exist to many solid ideas. Levies when they hold and are overrun turn the "protected" area into a reservoir instead of letting the water potentially wash away. Conversly below sea level the natural tendency is towards flooding as waters will go towards you instead of away when they are unbound.
"Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right."
So true.
My view is that the more involved "the system" gets in people's lives with laws dictating what can and cannot be done (for increasingly trivial things, or by abusing the legal process!), the more people will be negatively affected. People mostly only care about what affects them, or only see what affects them.
This essentially lead to a simple majority forcing a substantial minority to do, or refrain from doing, something. Yet the members of that majority may find themselves being similarly forced as a member of the substantial minority on a different subject.
Social (global) media means that that One Thing You Oppose can now be found quickly. Don’t like X, well X is happening somewhere. Whereas information used to be much more siloed, and therefore problems at least seemed much more local.
> This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political right" (which is no longer really a relevant tag).
I find it interesting that when someone goes the extra mile and posts a long and we’ll thought out article attempting to undo this massive divide cause by this mistrust that within the first few comments you find someone stating in a very condescending way that republicans are idiots.
You’re doing more harm than whatever good you think you’re doing. Nobody is going to be shamed into believing your beliefs. That should be clear by now.
> It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them.
Shared enemies makes for strange bedfellows. If some group in power is threatening groups B and C, even if B and C otherwise hate each other they will band together and fight for their own survival.
Creeping censorship will ultimately always self-defeating for this reason. You'll win some early victories against the extreme fringe that no one supports, but it never ends there.
Wondering to what extent the growing "left vs. right" divide is mostly artificially created as a distractionary strategy to keep attention away from the very real and growing divide of the Have's and Have-not's. And prolong the unfettered capitalism that nowadays is best-served with flawed democracies or even outright autocracy.
I think what you've hit on is that the real struggle, which is between labour and capital, has been replaced by a grab bag of issues that pitch themselves as being anti-authoritarian.
The left/right divide has been traditionally on the "very real and growing divide of the Have's and Have-not's".
Republicanism vs monarchy, socialism vs capitalism, libertarianism vs authoritarianism, anarchism vs fascism...
It always has been about "power be in the hands of the many" vs "the few". Often there is much nuance to be added, both in the moment and over time as categories are gradual, complex and changing. Some have been more consistent or radical, some focus on a narrower part or are generally more moderate. But it's the same essential struggle but has different faces throughout history.
There is also the issue when hierarchical side dominates, then the divide seems almost arbitrary, because you only get to have radicals of one side and moderates who keep trying to put band-aids over things.
Your distinction is just as artificial as left vs right. Fanatics and fundamentalists also always think everything they aren't obsessed in is a distraction deliberately engineered to undermine their oh so important cause.
Common enemies unite. It doesn't matter what divides you, if you only fight against what unites you. Coalitions and compromises are normal in a healthy society. It's more insane that people are willingly poison society, just because someone has a different stance on an unrelated topic.
The "political right" (which doesn' really include classical conservatives) is correct on the topic to err on the side of freedom in regards to information. I believe there is freedom to be gained through individualism and collectivism both, but the topic of censorship doesn't touch that in my opinion.
It is as you said, this even connects people that have different beliefs about sensible policy.
Yes, I think what you've said encapsulates my personal opinion (not from the OP but what I believe nonetheless): that classical conservatism is no longer the "right wing", that it has been entirely supplanted by libertarianism.
My critique of Substack is that our lesson from the last ten years is simple: speech should happen primarily on platforms that are prohibited from profit-seeking and run in the public interest. Censorship on these platforms should be prohibited, of course, but so should any form of profit seeking.
Our problem isn't censorship. Our problem is that our political/economic/religious/public health discourse is entirely mediated by corporations that are helmed by clever and well-educated folks and funded by the tippy-top of the elite financier class, who expect exceptional ROI.
> speech should happen primarily on platforms that are prohibited from profit-seeking and run in the public interest. Censorship on these platforms should be prohibited, of course, but so should any form of profit seeking.
No such platform has ever existed. How would you propose building one?
It's an interesting thought exercise and I have some experiments I have to get running. Instead of half-assing a bad answer, I'll think about this in the shower for the next few days and try to return to this later with an actually well-thought out answer.
But to be honest, my intent was mostly critique. If you're taking VC money and running a for-profit entity where your paycheck comes from getting folks to talk about divisive topics, I view you as part of a profoundly horrible problem and assume that your position on the censorship spectrum to be mostly about market positioning.
I love this website and its users. You're right, it's an interesting thought exercise. It reminds me of that experiment where a man tried to disappear.
Many countries have public media organisations that are funded by taxes or a license fee, and run in the public interest without a strong profit motive. The BBC is a well-known example, but many countries have their own version.
I don't think this is a solution though. These organisations are distrusted just as much as anything else.
That's the judicial system (not "the government") that decided that someone's privacy was more important than having their private life all over the street (which was hardly directed at the BBC, but more the tabloids).
You can of course argue about these things and where the balance should be, but most of these cases are little more than "some vaguely famous person fucked someone" and are not really "in the public interest" as such. Certain sections of the British press seem to think that you have no right to any privacy at all after you've appeared on TV two or three times.
To summarize that with "the BBC is regularly censored by the government" is quite misleading.
Of all the issues raised in this thread, preventing a DDOS of a virtual Boston Common is the only one I can claim -- with confidence -- that I know how to prevent ;-)
I don't think Speaker's Corner is in the Boston Common, but in general, yes, DDOS is an effective form of censorship, and freedom of speech ceases to exist where it holds sway.
I dont mind local publicly owned utilities providing internet while still allowing private competition, but anything on the state or federal level has too much power over the individual.
Yes, important problem. Probably you'd want something like a public benefit corp or class of public benefit corps with damn strong protections from political intferefernce, rather than a literal .gov setup.
Consider speech that is legal but likely to offend most Americans. For example, a picture gallery of American soldiers killed in Iraq, where each picture is captioned "Death to Crusaders, death to America!"
If the 1a.gov platform is limited to citizens, it limits the number of accounts that can use that platform for agitating against Americans. If the platform is open to anyone in the world, it's going to end up as the #1 host of terrorist-sympathetic media in the world. Most of the pro-ISIS videos that the big platforms scrubbed back in 2015 or thereabouts were not illegal under the "imminent lawless action" test [1]; platforms mostly cleaned up under color of Terms of Service, not color of law. It would be hard enough to adamantly protect the First Amendment while removing actually-illegal material [2] if limited to Americans. Opening it to the whole world would make the moderation problem truly Sisyphean.
[2] It would publicly host worst content, for longer, because (I presume) it couldn't just use automated classifiers and outsourced workers to determine when a published item or a whole account crosses the line to illegality. If it did use these tools, it would end up recreating the "banned without clearly stated reasons or possibility of appeal" problem that makes people unhappy with the platforms that already exist.
> If the platform is open to anyone in the world, it's going to end up as the #1 host of terrorist-sympathetic media in the world.
Is it not more advantageous to collect the metadata regarding disagreeable content and shadowban it to decrease engagement?
How would citizenship be established to the platform? Would it not allow pseudonymous content? Do parents get to control the platform use of minor children?
Is it not more advantageous to collect the metadata regarding disagreeable content and shadowban it to decrease engagement?
Shadow-banning legal but disagreeable content seems counter to the mission of a "publish anything that is legal under American law" platform.
I rather like the idea of having a public hosting platform that would allow Americans to publish anything that is legal under American law, but there are many questions about how that would work in practice (including those questions in your final paragraph). I also am not sure how much public support there would be for such a platform once people realize how much near-universally-loathed material is not actually illegal to publish under American law.
"Only citizens can post here" is among the most censoring systems out there today. How many legal non-citizen residents are in the US? "Oh these millions of people cannot speak" is a hilarious statement coming from a "free speech platform."
This is 100% what I used to think re: the censorship debate, so hear me out.
The problem isn't censorship or dangerous speech.
The problem is NOT censorship! Literally everyone can throw apache on an old laptop and then punch a hole in port 80 on their home router. Some issues with that setup, sure, but we had billionaire POTUS crying censorship. Fucker could buy a bunch of data centers with a week's income or whatever, so clearly has the ability to speak, but also isn't wrong that his speech on twitter/fb is being curtailed.
The problem is not dangerous speech either, though. Something happened over the last 10 years that I'm absolutely certain would not have happened if we were still hosting everything on geocities or BBSes.
To add on to your thought, I think the problem is somewhere closer to "network effects" or "expected reach".
Hear me out: there is Ana increasing expectation, realistic or not, that every voice CAN be heard (or words read, or whatever disability compliant version you like) by everybody else. That you have the RIGHT to be heard. That if you aren't heard (and maybe even amplified), you are being unfairly punished.
In the U.S. and E.U. and others there is some aspect of that enshrined in the founding documents, in the form of right to petition[1] but it generally doesn't spill over into the right for your ideas to be spread to your fellow citizen/countryman/human/otherkin beyond the government.
After all, why should [popular person] get so many views when MY videos or writings or recordings are so much better?
This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps while ignoring the massive numbers of smaller niche websites (like forums) run by people with small pockets, which allow differing amounts of diversity of discussion.
The Facebook/Twitter backlash is pretty far along and some people have migrated to Gab, Parler, Truth, etc. They are low SNR for me, so I don’t care to join them, as much of the US hasn’t either.
This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet and discourse was fine back then. People can invite others to their houses. There is still a town square concept, although it is increasingly private property (because governments are outsourcing lots of their functions). There is almost no barrier to entry to create a news/media company from scratch.
But even then people were ostracized from communities/families and people were kicked out of bars/homes or arrested or sued for their words — I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA.
Yes, large corps can affect discourse, but it is because humans are averse to using the scarce attention / memory they have. We don’t like the cognitive load of changing social media platforms every 2 weeks.
> This comment just feels like you are only pointing fingers at large corps
Good to know. That's not my intent. I am distinguishing between platforms and forums, not big vs. small. Platforms tend to be large corps, but there are many smaller players in the platform space. You named a few. I think all of those should be forced to be public benefit corps as well.
The line between forum and platform is weird, but I think I'd roughly define it using something like Section 230. Forums are for cohesive groups.
> I get the feeling that those who advocate for maximum freedom don’t have a good understanding of history of the USA.
I tend to agree. My current stance on social media issues comes from walking around Boston during the pandemic and thinking about exactly this topic.
> This country was founded 2000 years before the modern internet
2,000 years? Damn straight! Jesus was white as a pearl, 'Murican as you or I, and died for our freedom! (Let's not forget to laugh ;-))
Personally I think the solution is to have some sort of downward pressure on clauses in ToS contracts. Right now, those things could grow nearly infinitely long and clients would have to tolerate it. If corps had a significant reason to minimize the restrictive clauses, there would be a little more freedom for all.
The barrier to entry for making you're own twitter is building you're own damn internet. How can you say no barrier to entry when every major tech company will act in lockstep to refuse to do business with you? Hell even there datacenter started to refuse to do business; at that point you need to build a parallel world which is a pretty damn big barrier.
The barrier for making your own “Twitter clone” is low, unless it actually has to scale to Twitter’s perf. The barrier to making a “Twitter clone which has absolutely zero moderation” (which is close to what Parler said) means that you are unlikely to be able to find any vendors in the USA which will accept those contract terms or want to accept the liability.
Analogy: try couch surfing to minimize paying rent. A person with a good reputation and good roommate habits can easily find a place to stay and it will likely be cheap with lots of options for places to stay.
But if that person starts to consume the food that was bought by and marked for others, doesn’t do their part of the chores, starts arguments with roommates and guests, doesn’t pay their rent on time, disrespects the property, violates norms of conduct, then they cause harm to the responsible parties living in that home. Don’t be surprised when they get evicted and their social credibility (like AirBnB ratings) fall off and no one wants to host them. This is remarkably close to what happened when Parler was kicked off of the App Stores and then lost their CDN, DNS, and hosting.
They aren’t acting “in lock step”, they are all equally afraid of the consequences of hosting a high liability client and are looking for a contractual reason to cut their liability.
Have you seen the death threats a Plumber in Texas got because his truck was sold then ended up in ISIS in Syria/Iraq with his company logo on it? Branding and association have real world costs.
It’s also not clear if upstream providers have zero liability if they allow content that is blatantly illegal. I seem to remember that DHS / FBI will just barge into data centers with a warrant and pull servers off the rack with little concern for the other clients that are co-hosted on that physical hardware. The collateral damage of being a client in an unmoderated data center is far more than being in a data center where the moderation rules weed out the riskiest clients.
But if you ban profit-seeking speech that is also a kind of censorship, and a rather open-ended one. Plus you’ve now banned speech on the wrong kind of platform. I mean, if you think that’s a solution fine, but then don’t claim to be against censorship.
A more pragmatic goal might be that they are not ad or attention driven. It's the fight for attention (specifically "content" as a ruse to get you to see adds) that has led directly to the current censorship problems, as well as many other issues, in part because its created these big platforms that try to make everyone watch ads that are lightning rods for interests that want to control what people say.
I don't think subscription models suffer from the same problem, because their "content" is the actual product, not the bait, and so the communities they support are very different and their attack surface is smaller.
If anything, the substack incentives are even worse. At least radicalizing was a second-order effect of Google/FB incentives. It's damn close to the first-order optimization objective for a company that depends on getting people so worked up that they'll pay to join a mailing list. (Who pays to join a mailing list?! never in my life....) Answer: the Most True Believers.
Consumers choose to speak on platforms that are profit-seeking. How are you going to force your fellow citizens to stop doing so, and to use the non-profit versions instead?
There are, realistically, probably a bunch of things you could do. Repeal Section 230 except for public benefit corps and setup stringent rules about how they are run / how for-profits interact with them. And so on. I assume at least one constitutional amendment would be required, since money is speech.
I don't pretend the solution is easy, but I know for DAMN sure that yet another VC-funded social media company (substack) is not the answer. I am sure they disagree. I am also sure that Zuckerberg was sincere in the early days about bringing the world together.
Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.
That they agree with one piece of your politics at this particular moment in their company's growth and at this particular point in the evolution of your political beliefs is a massive red herring.
Let me repeat. Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.
Just because their interests are opposed to mine doesn't mean I can't trust them. Teacher's unions can use their poor performance as a justification for increasing their own pay which comes straight out of my pocket and yet I'm able to trust them. I'm evaluating their deeds, not their motivations. Calling something a non-profit doesn't magically make it pure. The Red Cross and Goodwill have plenty of problems, as do governments around the world.
You asked what substack is trying to do, and I think I gave the only accurate answer.
That said, your point is well-taken. I think one of my other comments already captures my thoughts on the point your making; let's move there to discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30093683
While accurate, it isn't a full answer. Substack does provide profits for venture capitalists, but it does so by fulfilling a particular market demand - demand for a censorhsip-free (or censorship-lite) platform. It is a somewhat niche demand, obviously - but it is the only aspect that differentiates them from facebooks of the world.
No, it is the full answer. The other stuff is their market position. That can change on a dime. (It also does nothing about to dual problem of stoking social division to generate more profit.)
> Substack is trying to generate returns for venture capitalists.
Yes, but they're doing this by countering the heavily editorialized and censored mainstream print media with a more free speech-oriented platform. This is exactly how we should exploit markets to produce good social ends.
I've wondered in the past if something like 1st.gov shouldn't exist, basically a Twitter clone protected by the 1st Amendment payed for by the citizens of the United States.
That would be horrible. Web hosting, sure. A Twitter clone, with (next to) no moderation‽ It'd better have better self-moderation tools than I've seen on any Twitter clone ever. A Twitter clone is a good environment for metric maximisation: what makes you click “share” thrives, being reworded and altered occasionally, in a manner analogous to evolution (but with a more deliberate mutation process than randomness). Something has to fight that process if you want the site to have value to anyone but sociologists.
Doesn't have to be one thing. You can let there be a market of platforms. Just no profiteering, either directly or indirectly. Easier said than done, of course.
Also, shouldn't be .gov. Public benefit but not government-owned.
very underrated comment and observation, and something that set off a cascade of fantasy scenarios and services in my mind where such an idea was more important and protected than any other. gonna have weird dreams tonight I think.
Pretty much none of the Fediverse is for-profit. People have tried, before. Nobody uses the for-profit Fedi services, because they're just bad. (There are for-profit hosting providers like Masto.host, but I don't think they count.)
Why would you want to mandate it? That would kill Fedi faster than anything. Make it an available option that stands the test of time, while other things come and go, and people will use it eventually. (The Fediverse is already over a decade and a half old; almost as old as Facebook.)
Although, there are some proposals in the EU to make it mandatory for social media companies to use open communication protocols like ActivityPub (an exaggeration of their existing obligations under GDPR, which most of them are ignoring already)...
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?
First online media that removed editor for the homepage and put an algorithm to decide which article is more important than other (based on clicks and shares), we got Kardashians, flat earth believers and everything went sideways. As someone who is 15 years in comms, public relations and media relations, for me, influencers were journalists, not some kid with 1 million followers on Instagram or TikTok. Now they are influencing general opinion and not some experienced journalist that is covering one topic for decade.
Now, call me old fashioned, but now you have generations of people who are "born" on social media, never go offline and now they are parents, and imagine what kind of role model do they give to their children.
It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust.
How everything changed, I will give you an example, COVID-19 breaks, nobody knows what's going on, first weeks of lockdown in Europe, and my first source of information was two people I trust, my mother master of pharmacy (MPharm) and my good friend doctor of chemistry, working in pharmaceutical company. They were my first sources, not some obscure web site, WhatsApp group or Facebook group, but people who read scientific journals and researches.
I'm watching "Dopesick" at the moment, and I'm beginning to understand why people don't trust medical professionals and Big Pharma.
Any call to trust journalists should be met with hoots of derision - I've worked with journalists and they (as a general rule) are not interested in "the truth", or in balance, but in creating a good story that will generate interest and go over well on Twitter.
There is a fundamental conflict of interest in Western society: people who are supposed to be trustworthy and are trusted to act for the public good are also allowed, even encouraged, to make as much money as they can from that position. Until we solve this, we are right to not trust too much.
It is indeed ridiculous to point to professional journalists, at this point in time, as seekers of truth. There are some, but the vast majority of our media has little interest in the truth. Instead they're opinion manipulators that are stuck with a communal point of view, and they drive that view onward regardless of reality. That's just how I feel now. Ten years ago I would have trusted the media a lot more.
In most dictatorships, many journalists are usually horribly mistreated. They get jailed, “commit” suicide, or vanish i.e. NK, Iran, Belarus, etc.
Unfortunately those governments’ tone and narrative is similar to what you’re saying here (based on my personal experience). Don’t get me wrong, I am not implying you are the same or you have the same intentions. It’s a different context. But this narrative, without rooting out the cause, leads to the rise of those dictatorships.
My point is that the problem is the system that incentives a group of people to game it as, you rightly mentioned, in order to be more successful. They have to get the most viewers, reader, clicks, impressions, you name it. It’s all the same.
The ways things work lead to emergence of toxic “journalism” and rotten social media platforms. These are side effects.
I agree (except, having also had personal experience of this situation, I think journalists do overplay the personal danger bit).
The cause is exactly what you say: the incentives are all wrong for accurate investigative journalism, which is what we need to keep the powerful uncorrupted. Unfortunately this is because the internet destroyed the business model for news, and there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. We need a new business model for investigative journalism, and while plenty of people are trying (including Substack in the article, who seem to be doing OK), none have really cracked it.
Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years.
It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice.
> It is important for the whole society to engage in critical thinking and build trust.
Critical thinking means listening to diverse viewpoints, weighing up the evidence and the arguments, critically examining them and then forming your own viewpoint.
To some extent critical thinking requires mistrust. If you blindly trust someone, why would you critically examine their utterances?
IMO it's to some extent good that trust in the old institutions are breaking down. They are no longer equipped to deal with the information age and we need to create new ones.
The new ones will need much more transparency in order to engender the trust that was lost. We live in the information age, OSS, wikileaks, public blockchains, wikis... these things aren't going away.
Why is there such a huge fight to get the FDA and Pfizer to publish the vaccine data? The FDA wanted it to take 75 years!
I think people underestimate the magnitude and scale of the changes awaiting us. Will we still have nation states at the turn of the century? Maybe, but it's not a done deal.
> Journalists have been serving the interests of moneyed elites since well over a hundred years. It's good that they finally have some competition, even if it means that flat earthers also get a voice.
Well, I wouldn't agree with you, as journalists (and here I mean real journalists) are often members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct. Random people on Facebook or influencers doesn't have that.
Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers.
You have to ask yourself where is the line for critical thinking, for example flat earthers - where do we draw the line and when it become apsurd? What we have is that people will now believe in anything, something that we proved and live with for centuries.
What we will have, oxygen deniers? They don't recognize oxygen?
> Well, I wouldn't agree with you, as journalists (and here I mean real journalists) are often members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct
This is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Clearly there are professional journalists who are not adhering to the code of conduct. So clearly you will claim that they are not "real" journalists, and that journalists are only "real" journalists if they adhere to the code of conduct. But this doesn't stop anyone from claiming to be a journalist, getting paid to be a journalist, or being part of the professional organisation while completely ignoring the code of conduct (as so many do).
> What we will have, oxygen deniers? They don't recognize oxygen?
We need the wacky thinkers. Yes, having someone champion a Flat Earth is a good thing. Groupthink is a very real danger. Remember the story of Plate Tectonics (someone saw how S America and Africa fit together, put together a theory that continents moved, was derided as a crackpot from all corners of Academia, turned out to be right [0]). Having an Oxygen Denier around would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
> Yes, having someone champion a Flat Earth is a good thing. Groupthink is a very real danger.
Just because someone thinks of absurd stuff, doesn't mean this fixes groupthink.
To combat groupthink requires critical analysis, and safety - that is, the group must allow for people who make different (but still logical) points that go against the grain. However, flat earthers do not fall into this category, because they are denying evidence, rather than imagining an alternative theory. Plate tectonics is different, since there's no evidence denying that theory!
I think the populous, in general, really just need to learn the scientific method, and how one discerns truths using evidence (and not fall prey to confirmation bias etc). This requires work, and i feel many do not get taught nor learn themselves.
> I think the populous, in general, really just need to learn the scientific method, and how one discerns truths using evidence (and not fall prey to confirmation bias etc)
Good luck with that. Even at the university where I teach this looks like an uphill battle.
There was an article on HN recently about how science is moving past the scientific method by using models rather than testing hypotheses with experiments. I'm not sure I consider this "science", but still.
There was no evidence for plate tectonics either, until they started looking for it. And, obviously, the burden was on the new hypothesis to prove itself.
I'm not saying we should encourage Flat Earthers to present at Astronomy conferences. I'm saying we should not try to shut them up. That "safety" you're talking about has to be boundless, because if there are bounds then they will shrink. Are shrinking.
> You have to ask yourself where is the line for critical thinking, for example flat earthers
There is no line. Everything and anything can be questioned.
There is nothing wrong with questioning the shape of the earth and then devising experiments to figure it out for yourself (as some flat earthers have done).
What the flat earthers do wrong however, is to then not trust the results of the experiments they themselves have devised (since these experiments invariably show the earth is not flat).
> members of professional organisation and they have code of conduct
Laws exist, so there are no crimes?
> Thanks to investigative journalists, you have things like Pandora papers.
Yes, but that’s their point - not everyone is exposing things, because the elites control the media. Do remember that the Panama Papers whistleblower got mysteriously car-bombed.
Just a week or so ago in Sweden public service hadn't published any articles on the government having lied about the existence of meeting protocols and memos from covid meetings.
It was out of the ordinary seeing them report only after that decision itself became a topic.
Not publishing is a very powerful tool, and no journalist is forced by the code of conduct to publish what their employer doesn't want.
More if you don’t trust journalists to be honest when they at least try to establish norms of behaviour you should trust some random person even less. Both are amenable to corruption.
A journalist is some random person too. Only a handful of people know the person to any degree. You are asking to trust some brand. A brand that is controlled by few rich centralized media owners (in the "free" countries, government, directly or indirectly, in others).
The main incentive of a journalist is the same as for any other employee. To Keep ones employment and to make money. The idealism, if it ever exists, diminishes over time as experience grows and the need for stable income too (family).
I was using the comparison to random people and influencers mentioned by zriha that spawned this thread of conversation. There are of course credible experts. However I’d argue many/most popular alternative sources chosen over journalism are not credible experts.
Not the whistleblower, but the journalist who investigated it.
Now, before you say this is proof that journalists are impartial and not beholden to elites... this is proof that journalists who act against the interests of the powerful and wealthy get terminated.
Other "journalists" see this and take note.
That's the stick. Then there are also the carrots.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was not the Panama Papers whistleblower. She was a whistleblower who used the revelations of the Panama Papers to join up the dots in her own enquiries into corruption in Malta. It's worth noting her killers got caught and the senior figures in the government who she accused of creating "a culture of impunity" were removed from power.
There's a lot of things I don't like about elitist journalism, but there's a whole class of investigative journalism that got done better in the old model than today. Cf. Evgeny Morozov.
As a little exercise, about once a day I take a pass through CNN or NPR, and then another through Fox News. Just to get a high level idea of what each side believes reality to be. It is fascinating how little overlap there is. For the most part I don't think people are really arguing with each other, they're just arguing with a straw man they have constructed to represent the opposition.
Looking in, from a non-US centric view, I just find it mind-boggling how sanguinary all the left/right trenches act and argue with each other.
[Which is doubly confused since your left would still be considered solidly right wing anywhere else in the world (bar maybe in Australia/Canada).]
If I think back to the early 90's CNN used to be regarded in the same light as the BBC or Reuters, with actual breaking news and world correspondents. Now it just looks like a pantomine of people deeply outraged about something inconsequential.
I don't know if it's the 24h news business model that is broken or if you actually have some sort of psy-ops going on trying to create division, but there seems to be a very vocal chunk of the US that is caught in some sort of outrage addiction.
Moderation should be fully reviewable. I made a site to do this for reddit [1]. As of this hour, user pages [2] work best because the archive service is down. Subreddit history pages [3], which show where the community and mods have disagreed the most, also still work.
Although I acknowledge that moderation is absolutely required to keep online communities on track, I also believe that moderation should be fully reviewable.
The best approach I've come up with is that moderation results in a label (such as "spam", "hate speech", "incivility", "misinformation", etc...) being applied to a user's problematic post. New users to an online community would have a standard set of filters applied to their account to achieve the default "moderated view", but would have full control to manage their filters and see (or not see) whatever content they want.
It's absolutely terrifying how welcoming people are to let large central actors dictate what they are allowed to see and hear. As an example, during the whole GME situation last year, the WallStreetBets discord server was taken down for "hate speech", conveniently at the same time that community was causing millions of dollars of losses for certain corporations. If you normalize the unquestionable removal of content, it will be used to suppress content that is contrary to the interests of powerful central actors.
I think it would go a long way towards building more civil communities if reddit would stop showing users their removed comments as if they have not been removed. In other words, let users see the red background on comments that moderators see [1].
The current system is duplicitous and breeds mistrust. It's possible that all the platforms do it, but as far as I know, reddit is the only one that has successfully scaled volunteer mods such that anyone can secretly censor anyone else.
Agreed. But I suspect that places like HN reply too much on "shadow" moderation methods. Also: I think while it's understandable why you can't see who downvoted/flagged a post, I also see this a weakness when the mechanism is abused - I think that there is no "skin in the game" to flag is an issue.
I was trying to find those “fake face masks” just so someone knew what I was talking about, and apparently they were all deplatformed from Google searches. I didn’t want to buy one, just reference it. But nada. Found it on DuckDuckGo and it’s now my default search engine.
It’s just so offensive they think they should control what I’m exposed to. Creepy and offensive. Google has lost its mission of making the worlds information accessible in a fresh, horrible way. Tragic.
I heard about "Proud Boys" a couple of years ago and went looking for more information to find out about their group so I could have an informed position on the subject. Google removed their website.
I understand Google feeling compelled to remove extreme and illegal content, but this is not that. Google removed them for political and/or moral reasons. DuckDuckGo let me find the website and form my own opinions. Imagine how many other websites Google is withholding for political and moral reasons? How much of our general knowledge is now carefully shaped and curated by Google, because that's what they allow us to see?
I also moved to DuckDuckGo. A search engine which removes the things you're looking for "for your protection" is no search engine at all.
I don't see how you can blame the company when they are controlled by people who threaten them in various ways; threatening them with regulation with public disinformation about them using mass media being one of them. I have no doubt some of the top level people there are also involved in some Epsteinisque plot so that these people can have more control over them. They're more than big enough to warrant such a thing.
In my opinion, they are merely complying to these pressures. Google is not being threatened to be regulated by Proud Boys nor is it likely that Proud Boys members have some dirt on their executives. So, they have no reason to remove Proud Boys from their search engine from their business perspective. Therefore the only reason can be that someone who has power over them tells them what to do.
They sell a product that potentially puts people in real danger. Choosing not to wear a mask is fine. An immunocompromised person can choose to cross the street when they see you. This product, allowing you to pretend to wear a mask in order to get close to people that don't want to be near maskless people is evil. And a "Rittenhouse Walks" t-shirt?
I'm glad they've been de-platformed. Good riddance!
This is a great example of censorship aligning with your biases. Today. A central theme to the discussion here is that, tomorrow, this censorship will likely not align with your biases. How will you feel about it then?
We have millennia of practical examples of the fact that ceding the power to speak will always hurt us all in the end. It will eventually be used to silence you and whatever you believe is moral and just. This is why we must be willing to accept speech we don't like. Especially speech we don't like, because that's the speech which is removed first.
Using "immunocompromised people" as the excuse for every abuse of rights and ethics is the same as the right wing using "think of the children" or "the terrorists will get us".
You know the difference between "the terrorists will get us" and "wear a mask to help protect others"? Only the second one is based in fact. Just because you refuse to believe such doesn't change this.
The reason Substack has "content guidelines" is because they want to make their own laws. If they only followed the law, they would only need to remind users what's illegal and what's not.
And so they have to go to great lengths to explain those laws that they are making, and why they exist, and how they're enforced, etc. And of course they present them as necessary and reasonable, and "the only way".
> We will continue to take a strong stance in defense of free speech because we believe the alternatives are so much worse.
They are not defending "free speech". Free speech is exactly that: let people say anything. Hate speech. Porn. Wild conspiracies. Praise of terrorism. Anything.
They are promoting a version of "speech" that is deemed acceptable in their own social and business circle. That version includes none of the above, but currently accepts antivax.
What is antivax? Some things which EU governments accept as law is deemed antivax in Canada (recognizing immunity from past infections)... M-W dictionary recently updated antivax to include those opposed to vaccine mandates. But now entire governments are dropping vaccine passports and not implementing mandates at all...
So what exactly does antivax mean and why should Substack not allow debate on the matter?
That's not my point. My point is that Substack pretending to defend "free speech" is deeply misleading, and probably delusional, if they believe it themselves.
Substack is not a white knight of liberty, it's the product of a time and a place, and as such is subject to external forces (the customs of said time&place). When those change, so will Substack, theories about "freedom" notwithstanding.
Judging by this whole thread, they are liberal enough (not political liberal, the real meaning) to still be attracting haters who think they're allowing too much.
They're definitely pushing what 2022 society thinks is 'too much freedom' although you're also correct in that they're doing it for profit because plenty of people think that the status quo is too restrictive...
Classically, the only way things like that are “hard forced” on a company that refuses to be canceled is visa/mc stop accepting them. This is a real case for crypto-currencies.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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 ...
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.
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.
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 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> > 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.
"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.
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".
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
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.
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?
They attract trolls and extremists, the regular people don't like sharing space with trolls and extremists, so they leave. Rinse and repeat for a while, and soon all the normal people are gone.
If Facebook permitted everything, they'd just be committing business suicide.
And yet the popular social media sites have far more moderation than classical platforms, which are not regarded as causing problem. You mean low-moderation platforms tend to have objectionable content. True, but I don't see the problem.
Which are the classical platforms? I'm not sure we've had any instances of wide reach distribution systems that completely lacks editorial oversight before internet companies figures out how to monetise raw traffic.
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.
Many people have lost trust in the government and the media because they have proven to be, in many ways, untrustworthy. Adding another social media site(especially one that is so focused on free speech it's lawless) is not going to help gain trust or create community. Have we already forgotten about the 2017 election cycle and the role that uncensored social media played in that?
From corporate sources, I hear “you must trust what we’re saying or there will be consequences.”
From independent sources, I hear “don’t take a single word we’re saying at face value, verify every claim we make and use critical thinking and research to judge whether you think this is the truth.”
Which approach is more likely to result in a society that values truth and integrity over the long term?
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.
This is as silly as Nixon's "credibility gap" or H. Clinton's "optics." Society has a corruption "problem", because it is built on power rather than any ethic. People don't trust it because it is untrustworthy, and its ideologies are constructed from ancient myths and revelations organized with retroactive justifications. Censorship is a tool of power to keep people from sharing that lack of trust with each other, that feeling that values imparted to them by their superiors are self-serving and hollow, so that, alone, they can't assemble factions that are dangerous to order. The internet has enabled so much peer to peer communication that people can casually create disintermediated formations at a rate that wesn't possible in society until now.
The actual content of that distrust is also not important and not noble. In the West it's 99% rewarmed Ezra Pound bullshit mixed with American Lost Causeism, Central European Blood and Soil naturist primitivism, Western European anti-semitism still battling over Dryfuss, and a thousand other, smaller revanchist fantasies. Our current order was constructed by men just like them, and any of them could have been (and gave a good try to being) the power doing the censoring right now. The magical thinking and mythmaking that distinguishes them falls away with power and the secular bureaucratization needed to rationalize and maintain it.
In the past, the thing most likely to get you killed was what you said to people. Rebels began secret societies, with fiercely guarded memberships, and disguised their meetings in coincidence and their discussions in euphemism.
You'll be censored when you threaten someone more powerful than you. Your stable lifestyle relies on the order set up by people more powerful than you, not for your benefit, but selfishly. You are their support structure. The reason you weren't censored before is because you actively propagandize for their order openly, and you keep ideas dangerous to that order to yourself. You can't even rebel right, your rebellion is an appeal to utterly orthodox strongmen who resemble nothing other than the great-grandparents of the people who rule you now, and who discarded their fiery, incoherent ideas like old clothes once they grew out of them and settled into the throne.
There are no more people meeting in secret and making effective plans than there ever were, in fact, far fewer because of the overarching domination of entertainment and commercial culture. Call me when you start seeing people hanging from streetlights.
It's not a problem, it's learning. We should have absolutely no trust in the current institutions. When people are openly lying in your face without any repercussions, openly stealing from you and just pay a small fine etc. why would anyone trust them?
> To those who endorse such an approach, we can only ask: How is it going? Is it working yet?
What argument is the writer trying to make here? It's not functioning well. Neither is complete lack of censorship. All that says is we haven't found the right balance.
Frankly, this article just reads like promotional copy to me.
Substack will always be a sort of niche site. It will never pull anything close to Facebook or Twitter numbers. So investors do not have much expectations for growth. If investors had higher expectations of ad-based growth, then censorship would be a consideration if it meant boosting ad revenue.
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.
I have a substack which occasionally talks about human genetics (from an informed POV – I have published in the field) so I checked out Substack’s actual policies.
They really are pretty liberal. I assumed they would have some policies against racism, but all they have is a ban on threats of harm to groups.
OTOH they have a blanket ban on porn. I suspect that is less due to deep political principle, more due to just not wanting to become a porn platform.
I’m glad they’ve made this statement, but I worry that they will feel pressure to water it down as a profit making company. So, I think we still need “protocols not platforms“. Or “not just platforms“.
>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.
Is this the kind of censorship we want to empower. One guy is going to decide who's views are acceptable and who's views are not. Turns out those who strongly disagree with him, their views are not acceptable according to him.
The views are not acceptable to him. The views are acceptable to the law. The views are described on the TV news because they were free to express their views and the TV news is free to report them.
Having powerful people disagree with you in public, and to promote their alternate view is not censorship.
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.
Scott Adams said something I liked once (this was in the context of a discussion on cancel culture):
"You can't fix what you can't talk about."
Obviously this is a generality and doesn't take into account malicious actors, but in general I agree. Whenever I've seen one group trying to coerce or shame another group into silence instead of engaging in good faith discussion, it has backfired spectacularly.
The article makes it like we should be trusting these institutions and that we don't because something not current has created the distrust.
Amazingly the authors essentially trust the consistent and consensus message coming from these platforms they say have ruined our trust. There must be some good cognitive dissonance backing that up.
The US has survived a lot of extreme speech. The Communist Part of the United States existed through the entire Cold War, and while they were sometimes hassled, they continued to publish their newspaper and pamphlets. They still have a web site. The American Nazi Party used to have a big sign on their HQ: "White Man Fight - Smash the Black Revolution Now". I walked by it as a kid. The sign stayed up until one of their members shot their leader. The Klu Klux Klan was an out and out extremist organization, but no one suggested in their heyday they should be muzzled. Just prosecuted for killing people. Even censorship of pornography mostly ended.
The pushback began in the 1980s, with the Meese Report on pornography. The authors were looking hard for something to criminalize, and hit on child pornography.[1] Not just making it, but possessing it. That was a new thing at the time.
The next big pushback was on Holocaust denial, first criminalized in Germany in 1985 and in France in 1990. A few other countries have followed, although not the US. This has gradually broadened into European laws against "hate speech", which is often political and very much a matter of opinion. While it seems to be settled law that the US government cannot prohibit hate speech, there's a lot of pressure on private organizations to do so.[2]
A new problem is overuse of the "big lie" technique.[3] For decades, nobody in a country with a free press tried that much, because it didn't work. The people pushing the lie were quickly discredited. That obstacle seems to have been overcome. That's leading to a new era of censorship merely for being wrong.
I'm partial to the Athenian version of free speech. Every citizen was invited - nay, encouraged - to speak their mind and offer political advice in the assembly. But if your policy turned out to be disastrous to the city you'd be banished, your property confiscated, or worse.
I really like substack as a platform. They seem to be not as aggressive on monetisation as medium. On my blog I don't want my users be tracked and I want to offer my content for free. Their stance on free speech here I also applaud.
Unfortunately substack is not yet as good on the discovery side.
> Unfortunately substack is not yet as good on the discovery side.
I think there's a good chance that that is what for now has kept it from turning into the low-quality mess that medium is. Overly pronounced discovery features easily lead to a downward spiral.
> Unfortunately substack is not yet as good on the discovery side.
It's getting better. A few months ago all the searches I did brought up only the top Substacks from barely-related category. Now you can search the name of a Sub with no subscribers and it actually comes up, and when you search specific keywords it's far more contextual, doesn't just bring up the top Subs from other categories.
I mean.. let's be fair... censorship and propaganda has just got biger in the last few years, mostly because trum pointed it out... but we all remember the "iraq has WMDs" and other stuff even before trump.
The thing that saddens me the most is treating anyone who just wants pure, raw data as a skeptic:
- X infected by covid today --- how many of those are expected to be asymptomatic, how many will have a "mild cold", how many will get a high fever and be useless for a week, how many will be hospitalized, and how many will die?
- Y hospitalized *with* covid... how many of those are there because they can't brethe, and how many have an appendicits? No official number (atleast here) makes that distinction... if 70% of the patients would be there, covid or not, and the hospitals are at 200% capacity, then covid is not an issue
- Z deaths *with* covid... if you die in a car crash 20 days after a covid test, you're counted as a covid death...
...
"back in the time", the journalists would be asking the politicians (and usually representatives of random health organizations and expert groups handling this epidemic) for this data, and bothering them, until they got it... and now? Just asking about the raw numbers marks you as an antivaxxer, commenting about these thins is basically limited to a few (eg. reddit) threads/subreddits (and just commenting in those will get you banned from a bunch of other subreddits, even the ones you never participated in).
tldr: even if I don't care about the opinion pieces, asking for raw data should be the first thing journalists do, and not a thing that gets random people banned
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.
Funny how in the early 2010s most people and activists feared tech storing too much data and violating privacy - now the only narrative from activists presented on the news and search results seems to be about a lack of censorship with no word on privacy (e.g. "Grrr Qanon", "Grr vaccines", "Grr person with regressive political opinion").
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.
My position is the deplatforming free speech will never work, as censorship
itself legitimizes the censored:
a nice example of poetic irony in action, but few people understand it.
I believe the trust crisis is about social media itself - about physical ability to write anonymously. It couldn't not result in avalanche of lies, both honest and malintentional - the infamous "Putin's bots" are a part of the problem but not even such a big part. Problem is because everyone can post, opinions sparking most outrage will be reposted and thus multiply the most - because the neutral, centrist opinions are just not clickbait-y enough. It results in division naturally - because soon almost half of everything posted is offensive to half the people, as the middle ground disappears. That amplifying, and thus divisive, power of ability to repost is by itself enough to split society in groups.
Maybe solution is to tax social media, in a way that they become more like traditional media? Essentially, you pay based on how many people saw your content - it may be cents per year if you just share your vacation photos with a bunch of friends, but if you post an anti-mask meme, it will drain your pre-paid account in minutes as it is being reposted, and then disappears and no longer seen by anyone (along with the rest of your content) when you reach zero, before you refill?
I see no problem with the principle of free speech here: there was free speech before social media but you could never go on TV, publish a newspaper ad, or print a pamphlet for free. Free speech is about freedom, not price. And just ban all "free as in free beer" social media outright.
Nobody complained, and maybe things were a little better... but cigarette companies seemed to have plenty of money without people's best interest in mind.
What if someone invents a very bad product, and you effectively censor warnings about it?
I guess the way around it would be donations built into the platform, but then you're back to people sharing crap.
Anything that makes more popular posts more likely to disappear than less popular posts is going to feel like central control by whoever has money, I don't think that will increase trust.
I think central control by whoever has money is inevitable in any case right? This is the nature of society - money buys power, power makes money. If we will be pretending it can possibly not be the case we will just be shooting ourselves in the foot, because life can't be built based on lies.
> What’s coming isn’t fascism or communism, like the left-wing and right-wing pundits will have you believe, even though they don’t believe it themselves. What’s coming is the exact opposite of that, a world where the civilized concepts of freedom and equity are extrapolated to their decivilizational limit, where you ain’t the boss of me and we are all equal, where all hierarchy is illegitimate and with it all authority, where no one is in charge and everything is in chaos.
> You can argue this may be preferable to the status quo, in the same way the chaotic Russia of the 1990s was on balance better than the authoritarian Soviet Union of the ’80s. You can argue it may be inevitable; as the Chinese proverb goes, “the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” And you can argue that this transitional period of anarchy may be lamentable, but that it’s better than the other team being in charge, and that we can build a better order on the other side.
> Maybe so. But prior to any rebundling, I think we’re on track for quite the unbundling.
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.
> we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.
In the abstract, it is. But platforms that allow hate to thrive usually find it shouts down all other voices, and those who wish to discuss ideas honestly and openly will find somewhere else to do it.
> While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes
That's good, though I see some grey areas there, particularly around what constitutes a call to violence.
Regardless, the point stands - they still censor voices and ideas, but they've drawn a line where their ideology places it. It's a matter of degree, not absolute.
I think claiming "censorship" is often either an attempt by those in positions of influence to get attention by playing victim (see many super popular voices in Twitter and Facebook like Jordan Peterson) or bigots claw back a position on a platform when the site didn't wish to spread their vitriol
sure it happens, but I think the spotlight is often in the wrong corner
I really don’t understand why people think it is censorship which is the problem — writer’s of famous utopias didn’t see into the future, they talk about their present, extrapolating from it. I really don’t think the Orwellian world-view would have much to do with our present - the problem is not censorship, but misinformation, based on lack of knowledge, and indeed, trust.
Even though the internet is more centralized than we would like to, it is practically impossible to censor it even today. There is no way to e.g. remove every antivaxx, anti-intellectual bullshit article, “”study””, whatever no matter what, the most any big platform can do is deplatform/tweak their algorithms to prefer different content (which they gladly do for anti-science, unfortunately, because people shouting stupidly at each other drives up their views, quite a disgusting metric). So all in all, if you want to make something disappear from the internet, you just have to spam it with misinformation.
What's interesting to me personally is that no matter where someone stands on their political spectrum, they may interpret Substack's guidelines http://substack.com/content very differently.
I find myself standing with what Substack are saying in this post, and yet after reading their guidelines, I can see someone attempting to forge an argument for censoring the topics discussed in their post (promotion of vaccine distrust and misinformation) in the name of preventing harmful activities.
Of course, on the other hand, and this is where I believe to stand with Substack–what someone may find to be the promotion of vaccine distrust or misinformation, another may find as healthy discourse on the topic.
Ultimately, in my opinion, we should let people decide on their own and not let tech companies masquerade as arbiters of truth.
This is rich coming from substack, who built themselves on diverse voices, and then only offered their "Pro" funding to conservatives, transphobes, people in the "ideological dark web" and those who are a bit of all of the above (Glenn Greenwald?)
Censorship is also about who you uplift, and substack has been very one-sided here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The question is where that trust problem comes from. Taking the trust problem as granted and shying away from certain measures like censorship is not going to solve anything. Not to discuss whether censorship is wrong or right, but wouldn't this then be a case where we just put lipstick on a pig?
I grew up in Austria and back in the day the Nazis also didn't trust a lot of people. But their lack of trust was totally irrational and based on nothing real. Not doing something because you are afraid they might lose even more trust would have been the wrong way to go back then.
And it might be today as well. If we want to do something here we jave to divide those who reasonably doubt the integrity of the media from those who doubt it no matter what. This is an issue of education, of media law, etc. But giving in to people because they stop trusting is not the way out.
I don't think that this is really a "trust problem". It's more of a misattribution problem. People think they know what the "other side" is thinking, but they really don't.
Barely anyone "doubts the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines". This is a tiny, tiny, trivial minority.
The main arguments I come across are some combination of:
"coronavirus is a non issue for me, and so the efficacy of a vaccine is irrelevant"
"coronavirus is going to spread to everyone anyway, and therefore the efficacy of a vaccine (at reducing the spread) is irrelevant"
Given this, if you go at it from the angle of assuming that people think vaccines are salt water (or microchips or whatever) you're not going to get anywhere. Because what you _think_ people think, is not actually true.
> The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point.
How is that not "doubting the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines"?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
I honestly have never seen a single shred of evidence or just even common sense that backs these platitudes about trust and free expression up.
Let's take another nation and covid as a concrete example, Singapore. In Singapore, there's not a lot of free speech. Yet there's a lot of trust. Lee Kuan Yew, in his biography, addressed this trust question very directly, and commented on American media as well.
Lee Kuan Yew was very direct in prosecuting speech that put into question the authority of leadership when it faced (unfounded) criticism. His argument was that, when leadership can be cheaply criticized, there is a categorical distrust in authority because everyone is perceived as equally corrupt. Which is something that's part of almost every post in this thread as well. In a culture in which everyone is "equally bad" grifters and con artists can thrive.
When looking at the Covid response, it wasn't really leadership in the US that dropped the ball. Even the fairy sketchy and controversial last administration managed to produce a free vaccine, within a year, distributed at record speed to everyone. Who didn't pick it up? The people. Who railed against it? Talk radio. And yet the line keeps being parroted that authority cannot be trusted.
Merit and authority and trust are build up slowly and are hard won. When everyone can be defamed, when lie and insult comes at no cost, and if everyone can spread competing versions of reality for free you are in an environment in which trust is impossible. Not because there isn't enough criticism, but because there's too much.
>Merit and authority and trust are build up slowly and are hard won. When everyone can be defamed, when lie and insult comes at no cost, and if everyone can spread competing versions of reality for free you are in an environment in which trust is impossible. Not because there isn't enough criticism, but because there's too much.
This has been the war cry of despots, kings, and dictators since before recorded history. There are very few examples of it working out well for anyone. "I am preventing you from criticising me for your own good." Isn't quite as noble or virtuous as you think it is.
Genuine question, why not? Why is paternalism bad, because it's an offensive idea to a 21st century audience? It's a funny aspect of the whole free expression thing that the only thing you cannot question, because it immediately evokes this kind of response, is the system itself. Isn't that supposed to be the point?
I didn't make a war cry at all, I think fanatic questioning of authority is just the dogma of our time, in every domain, not just speech. And that's very new. We have India and China, thousands of years old civilizations still kicking without any absolutist notion of free speech, but I must accept the idea that any person can broadcast to a football stadium full of people, an experiment of the last two decades or otherwise I'm a despot?
There are libraries of works dedicated to this from the Enlightenment onwards. There are two tracks you can pursue here:
1. Practical examples of authoritarianism working. Does the suppression of dissent result in better life outcomes for citizens? It's a fair hypothesis, and is easy to test. Explore hundreds of civilizations over thousands of years and try to find examples of it working out well for citizens. IMHO, there aren't many.
2. Read the political, historical, and philosophical writings of the greats on this subject: John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson. They provide far better arguments against the suppression of dissent than I ever could. Their arguments are extremely well considered, extremely convincing, and backed by historical examples.
Personally, I try hard to base my position on tangible evidence. "Does this thing actually result in the outcome I desire?" Because I can't find any good examples of authoritarianism working, and many good examples of democracy working, I side firmly with the latter.
However, I must also admit that the internet is a major human evolution. It is unprecedented in its scale and reach. Social media is causing enormous harm, and we are operating under the de facto pretense that this harm is worth the benefits. It could be that social media is undermining how democracy works, and that we need to find a better way forward. I can admit that, but I am yet to see convincing arguments for a) the existential danger to democracy, and b) a better social structure than democracy.
I completely disagree with you, but that was a very well put argument.
I agree that the censorship/trust connection is misplaced. America has been high trust, now it’s low trust, it’s always had the second amendment. So you can’t explain a change by a constant.
I think the best argument for freedom of speech is the one put forward by Mill: there is no other way to find out the truth but by letting all arguments be heard.
>“We don’t have a misinformation problem,” Larson said. “We have a trust problem.”
How much 'misinformation' ended up being true? Some things very rapidly was labelled misinformation.
How much 'truth' ended up being misinformation?
Let's say hypothetically covid disappears and a new virus starts spreading that is actually as bad as the spanish flu. The consequences of all the lying by politicians means we're nowhere near prepared for it.
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!
