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“Silenced” here means any manner of active suppression (shaming, ridiculing, verbal abuse, social bullying, even physical violence, etc) of an idea, rather tha
by electrograv 9y ago
“Silenced” here means any manner of active suppression
(shaming, ridiculing, verbal abuse, social bullying, even physical violence, etc) of an idea, rather than simply (1) ignoring it on a personal level, or (2) responding to it with argument via evidence and reason.
If an idea we disagree with is rare or harmless, we often ignore it. If an idea we disagree with is more common and worth refuting, we should respond to it with debate. If all parties involved in a debate are reasonable, consensus is possible. In aggregate, humans are capable of being reasonable, thus society progresses over time (amortized).
Sadly, there is often difficulty reaching consensus immediately — especially with deeply entrenched viewpoints. However, given time, history has proven over and over that truth prevails though patient use of rational argument. It is only through presentation of evidence and calm, rational argument that society progresses.
Other, more heavy-handed means of ideological conquest have more often than not made the world a much worse place. In fact, more than just a few million deaths have resulted from what we could call “non-rational ideological conquest” (which inevitably manifests in progressively more violent ways).
- angry_octet 9y agoRational argument doesn't scale, bots and memes scale. Blocklists do scale, and it's only because identity platforms (fb, twitter) are also locked down content control platforms that we haven't seen more global blocklists. I fully expect decentralised social behaviour blocklists to emerge in the near future. Who would want to (employ/socialise with/do business with) a (trumptard/libtard)? Why take the risk of employing someone with racist tendencies, etc. It might even use a distributed cryptographic ledger.
- electrograv 9y agoRational argument is difficult to scale (certainly more so than memes and propaganda bots), but not impossible. Real social progress takes real work, but it’s worth it. Your last two paragraphs sound an awful lot like the book 1984. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you check it out.
- angry_octet 9y agoI think Trumpism and climate denial are good counter-arguments to that. I think we (humans, not any one society) are fundamentally vulnerable to propaganda, and we've opened a Pandora's Box of next level propaganda tools (micro targeting, social distribution, anonymous participants) but have not evolved educational defences yet. "You can fool some of the people all the time," as said by Unknown -- probably not Lincoln, but one of the things continually misattributed to him, in an earlier style of meme misinformation. It is ironic that people thought that the internet would purge misinformation (by making sources easier to check) but instead it has made it worse, by bypassing expertise, analysis and references altogether. 1984 isn't really about tribal groupings using computerised social credit systems, but I take your point. From the authoritarian POV, China already has nascent systems to score each citizen's thought correctness factor.
- spdionis 9y agoReminds me of that Black Mirror episode where you could block people. Sounds horrible.
- angry_octet 9y agoExcellent series, though I'd not seen that one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirro...
- r00fus 9y agoFreedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]