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That common argument rests on norms established by millennia of relatively difficult communication. Best not to assume that the same people would come to the sa

That common argument rests on norms established by millennia of relatively difficult communication. Best not to assume that the same people would come to the same conclusions today. For example, QAnon believers have not had their speech restricted. That conspiracy theory is as open as anything you could name. People have challenged it. It's still going. If you believe that challenging terrible ideas makes those who hold them think twice... why hasn't the exact argument you're using gotten rid of the terrible idea that we should restrict speech? Answer: because logical refutation doesn't work. I am not arguing against the slippery slope. This is a very, very hard and risky problem. I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.

mrguyorama 8y ago
A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted: Moon landing conspiracy Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism Fad diets and "detox"s Anti-intellectualism Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube) Global Warming etc
- lylecubed 8y ago
  And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Not Mark Twain
  - yifanl 8y ago
    If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?
      - qu4z-2 8y ago
        I think their point was that unless you're willing to accept Minitrue you don't have an authoritative source of truth to check against.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    That's all fine and dandy, but is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?
    - lylecubed 8y ago
      You posted them as examples of "bad ideas." Shouldn't you be able to tell me the factual standing behind the positions you hold?
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        Are you asking me to go through each of them and give a thorough post about the background of the issue, the facts as they lay, the most reasonable conclusions, the possible influences/biases from each side and their possible agendas etc etc etc? And you're saying that I should do this each and every single time someone wants to discuss a (IMO) discredited study or blog post or something? Do you not see how easy that is to abuse by people acting in bad faith? It's a pretty classic DDOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
        lylecubed 8y ago
        Isn't that what you tried to do to me? You asked me this: "is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?" First of all, why are you asking me about the factual standings of your examples? And second, you didn't just allege that the ideas you listed were 'silly'. You said they do "actual damage" despite being out in the open and actively refuted. Is it so much to ask that you provide proof? Had you just said "I think these are silly ideas" we wouldn't be having this conversation.
        scarejunba 8y ago
        Hang on, just to check, which of the specific things called out as "bad ideas" do you take issue with?
      - ubernostrum 8y ago
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? This is a bad faith argument. I say so because the purported mechanism for such decision-making is actually spelled out upthread, and because this rhetorical question is then followed by a glaring fallacy of composition that seeks to draw a general conclusion from a single and highly over-simplified example.
    - will_dev_4_food 8y ago
      It’s not a silly example but rather a common one. Many years ago it was only the fat that were attractive because they were the financially secure. Many believed that royalty were th only form of legitimate government, and colonial activity among “savages” was doing them all a favor. Science, academics, and even personal experience vary with time. Not all variance that follows is truthful...some is exaggerated purposefully or accidentally, though most is considered good information at the time.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        I didn't say it was silly. Please try to differentiate between the quotation that I'm responding to and what I said in response.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      So, the anti-GMO movement, far and away has more blood on its hands than even Alex Jone's dumb theories (see golden rice.) Should we police that speech? I believe anti-GMO is a silly idea, and a deadly one. Far more deadly that Jones claiming Sandy Hook wasn't real, far more deadly than a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Yet, we allow it, in fact in many cases we encourage it on the corporate/company level (see Chipotle.) There are tons of "mom blog" type pages on Facebook that push this crap, it's a much much bigger industry than Jones. Where is the outrage there? Is it ok to ban their speech from a corporate platform? It does way more societal damage. Gwyneth Paltrow pushes things with her company "Goop" that can cause serious health problems. Should we ban her from Facebook? I just wonder where you draw the line, because if we're talking raw statistics on society damage, InfoWars or virtually any form of "hate speech" isn't even in the top 10.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? Any private, non-common-carrier party that is asked to relay it. That is what freedom of speech/press means: people are free to evaluate content and decide for themselves whether to participate in spreading it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - BryantD 8y ago
    I think that's the core question right there. For a while, various governmental bodies got to be the authority figure deciding which ideas were widely propagated. It's interesting to consider the outsized influence of Texas school boards here; the people who decided which textbooks would be used in Texas were elected officials. Texas has a huge textbook market. Accordingly, textbook vendors were incentivized to publish textbooks which fit Texas standards, and other states who didn't have the same influence wound up with those textbooks. So: "who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?" Texas elected officials. That's suboptimal in my view. It is also not great that four or five major companies have the same decision-making power. Fixing the problem is difficult, but I take some comfort in knowing that it's not actually a new problem.
- polanon 8y ago
  I don't know about moon landing, vaccines or whatever internet stories, but revisionism about gaz chambers and the 6 millions number is heavily documented. I read quite a bit about it to make my own idea and it's... disturbing. And the anti-revisionists do not answer with facts or science, so it's even more "disturbing". Some historians have publicly gave up trying to fight revisionists with facts, because they can't - there is no material to help them. Calling revisionism silly is literally anti-intellectualism. BTW, the only story I want to believe is the MASSIVE CONSPIRACY WITH CHEMTRAILS :D
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    In your understanding, did millions of jews die in the holocaust as part of a German plan to eradicate a race?
    - t3soro 8y ago
      Log-lost diary of German officer Alfred Rosenberg vindicates his testimony at Nuremburg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-lost-diary-of-nazi-alfred-rosenberg-turned-over-to-holocaust-museum/2013/12/17/b422b260-6738-11e3-8b5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?utm_term=.40b2807dfa0e https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-lost-diary-of-nazi... > Scholars had been eager to see what this longtime Nazi from Hitler’s inner circle had to say in the missing journal. But details of the Nazis’ grand plans for genocide and brutal domination are absent from the pages. Rosenberg testified in Nuremberg that there was no such plan for the wholesale murder and eradication of the Jewish race, and that the idea had never even crossed his mind. In other words, the only plans the Germans had was to expel the Jews from their territory. Nonetheless, he was not believed and sentenced to execution by the court.
      - tpush 8y ago
        You missed this parts of the article: > "Rosenberg does occasionally raise the issue of Jews. On March 28, 1941, he referred to the opening conference of his brainchild, the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question. I regard the conference as a success,” Rosenberg wrote. “It is, after all, for the first time in European history, that ten European nations [were] represented at an anti-Jewish conference with a clear program to remove this race from Europe. “And now this perception of a historic necessity is backed up by force.”
- ddingus 8y ago
  So? Laugh at them, and then contribute facts. Next. At any given time, these things are all part of the conversation. Suppressing them only adds to the allure. Attempting to manage it, "for their own good" will not end well, and it won't end well because way too many people will fail to trust, share that and undermine it all. As they should. That problem is why there is a First Amendment in the first place. I know that does not apply here, and I know why too. Not my intent. The dynamics that lead to having a First Amendment are my point. The moment people begin to mistrust, and that catches fire and spreads is the moment the dialog gets toxic and hostile. See my comment up thread.
  - mrguyorama 8y ago
    And people like my mother? Who didn't do so well in statistics and science and math and therefore do not have the tools to rationally judge one claim versus another? How do we help them not get pulled into, often alluring and attractive, circles of hate?
    - ddingus 8y ago
      I love you mom, but those people are fucking clowns. How can I help? (Have had this exact exchange. Took a while, but did resolve. Human problems take human work.)
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        Lane Davis's dad tried that approach, arguing to his son that he (the son) had fallen down a neo-nazi rabbit hole. Davis denounced his dad as a 'leftist pedophile' and stabbed him to death. I could supply a laundry list of examples, but the basic point I'd like to communicate is that once someone signs up to an eliminationist philosophy we have (to misquote Churchill) established what they are, and the only question is in what order they intend to pursue that project. I want to be careful here to distinguish between ideas that mre merely wrong and those that involve imposition of their calculus upon others. For example, I consider flat earthers ridiculous but it's not like they are threatening to flatten out anything they consider overly curved.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Generally the people who post this stuff are the people already preconditioned to believe it. These people also have their views emboldened when they see it is banned...they view it as some conspiracy to hide the "truth." IMO, these bans against Alex Jones aren't going to have the good intended result they were meant to. If anything, this could drive more direct ad dollars to him and allow him to expand into another vertical that may attract and empower even more like him. But I'm biased, I am generally against any form of censorship unless it is exploiting someone against their will (see snuff films, pedophilia, etc.) Slightly unrelated, but I fear that the Russian boogeymen is going to creep its way into outright censorship in the West via corporate America...which ironically is an outcome Putin and other Western adversaries desire.
  - acdha 8y ago
    > Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Do you have a citation for that? It seems unlikely that the Internet didn’t increase the reach for fringe views by making them available to everyone rather than just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      Are you really suggesting that conspiracy theories such as JFK, Roswell, Area 51, Antivaccine/"mark of the beast," Moonlanding, Big Foot etc weren't already in popular culture before the internet was popularized? Because, in fact, many of them spread because there was no wide usage of the internet (Roswell, probably being the #1.) It helps create lore. Even X-Files, a show that I adore, was really pre-popularized internet era. Think of Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc. Those conspiracy theories led to the Oklahoma City bombing. And they were widespread prior to the internet being a big thing. Think of the Turner Diaries which was big in the early 90s, there are too many examples to even list. 9/11 was maybe the first popular internet spread conspiracy, but I would make a strong argument that without the internet it may have been more widespread because there is less online debunks. I don't know if you've ever argued with a conspiracy theorist but their minds were made up before any major theory was proposed. It's a natural distrust of authority. Do I have hard data? No, and I am willing to be that it would be incredibly hard to measure that anyhow, but I do have tons of anecdotes and history to back up the claim that it's nothing new. It's human nature.
- Turing_Machine 8y ago
  > A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage Worst idea that still holds traction and has caused actual damage: Marxism. >100 million people murdered so far, and it's still going strong. If we're going to start banning bad ideas from the Internet, maybe we should start with that one.
  - spaginal 8y ago
    Amen.
ddingus 8y ago
Thought experiment for you: Say we remove Qanon from all platforms of reputable note. Do you believe 4chan would ever comply? Secondly, what impact does that have on the reputable platforms vs 4chan? How does that all break down for people? My thoughts are: 1. 4chan will continue very liberal speech. People will continue to visit, and those numbers will increase due to the Streisand effect. 2. The number one and two responses to Alex Jones recent and wide spread ban are: Who is next? FINALLY! And those trend along authoritarian lines most clearly. Anti authoritarians are more critical and make it clear they do not need to be protected from bad speech. Authoritarians make it clear they value said protection because of what could happen. I bet the same happens with QAnon, should that decision get made. Net outcome: Polarization along authoritarian lines. Frankly, I think Jones is laughable. I also think specific speech he made should be removed because it is defamatory and or inciting in nature. I think a blanket, "fuck this guy" is a grave error. I think that because: The answer to bad speech is more speech, and post removal is a form of speech, given it is used where speech is actually criminal. And it is understandable too. Bans are not those things and can create martyrs as well as augment attention to other platforms where fans, supporters will quickly gather to discuss injustice. I think the laughable should be laughed at too. Civility is difficult here. Forcing that, as in nobody gets offended, dilutes speech down, and prevents "more speech" from working as it should. That all forms a resonant cycle we probably will not like very much. At the root of all this is forced trust and an abandonment of safe harbor. That will not be easy to undo, and it will divide people into those authoritarian vs non authoritarian camps too. I gotta be honest and will gladly side with the anti authoritarians. Do not need the protection, and I have a very, very thick skin. There are few ways to actually impact me, and I do understand my agency in conversation well. I can't control others, but I can control me. Bad speech from clowns and asses is entertainment. It isnt something I give weight to. Nobody should. That they do, and that they are enabled with this idea of protection being somehow needed is likely to do more harm than good. Anyway, the Qanon types will find and communicate where the speech is, just as the Alex Jones types will. And then they will share that and martyr status should prove effective in rebuilding the lines of communication, only now we have doubt. Who is next and why? How do people know the difference between corruption and abuse of power / money from a genuine act to manage criminal speech properly? What of things like profanity? More basically, how do people understand they are having a real conversation as opposed to just a permitted, even encouraged one? I want the real conversation and will seek that. Got no time for Disneyland type conversation.
Nadya 8y ago
>I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away. It doesn't make them go away. It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private. If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil. If you refuse to let me speak about vaccines that only further proves that you're evil and trying to hide the truth - and strengthens my indoctrination. Now, poor arguments against anti-vaccers also serve to strength the indoctrination so there's some bad with the good... (Also just to be certain on things: "you" and "I" are used generically for easier writing, I support and believe in vaccines.) There are also plenty of bad ideas that do die to public scrutiny - think of anytime anyone has ever been talked out of "doing something stupid" because they shared what they had planned to do.
- BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
  > If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil Understand that forcing vile ideas into obscurity and forcing people to only ever see vile ideas are not even close to being the same thing. You could even say that they're almost opposites.
- BryantD 8y ago
  > It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private. This does not appear to be the case. Consider the math, if nothing else: Bad Idea Public convinces .1% of those who hear it and those people are irrationally convinced. Bad Idea Private convinces 10% of those who hear it and those people are likewise irrationally convinced. I'm assuming the private bad idea is 100 times as effective, which may or may not be accurate. Even so, as long as your private circles are smaller than ten million people or so, we're better off than we would be if your bad idea was hitting a billion people on the Internet. I'm still not arguing about the difficulty of telling which ideas are good and which are bad.
pdkl95 8y ago
> logical refutation doesn't work. It can work, if-and-only-if if it is done after real communication has been established. Most people trying to refute "obviously wrong" ideas skip the first step and start with arguing in a language and framing that they understand. This is noise when the other person uses a fundamentally different framework for what counts as "facts", "evidence", "authority", etc. One of the better explanations of what I'm talking about is this[1] essay. While it discusses the creationist "debate", the ideas about trying to educate people that are resistant to science and logic apply generally. Yes, logical refutation rarely works. However, did you bother to learn their language so there is a foundation of actual communication to build upon? Or did you argue in a language they don't understand? Even worse, did your argument appear to contain a lot of phatic expression that is hostile from their point of view? [1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s/ http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi... (see the heading "Hierarchical View of the World" and "The Problem of Language" for the main argument)

mrguyorama 8y ago

A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted: Moon landing conspiracy Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism Fad diets and "detox"s Anti-intellectualism Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube) Global Warming etc

lylecubed 8y ago
And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Not Mark Twain
- yifanl 8y ago
  If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?
    - qu4z-2 8y ago
      I think their point was that unless you're willing to accept Minitrue you don't have an authoritative source of truth to check against.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  That's all fine and dandy, but is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?
  - lylecubed 8y ago
    You posted them as examples of "bad ideas." Shouldn't you be able to tell me the factual standing behind the positions you hold?
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      Are you asking me to go through each of them and give a thorough post about the background of the issue, the facts as they lay, the most reasonable conclusions, the possible influences/biases from each side and their possible agendas etc etc etc? And you're saying that I should do this each and every single time someone wants to discuss a (IMO) discredited study or blog post or something? Do you not see how easy that is to abuse by people acting in bad faith? It's a pretty classic DDOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
      - lylecubed 8y ago
        Isn't that what you tried to do to me? You asked me this: "is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?" First of all, why are you asking me about the factual standings of your examples? And second, you didn't just allege that the ideas you listed were 'silly'. You said they do "actual damage" despite being out in the open and actively refuted. Is it so much to ask that you provide proof? Had you just said "I think these are silly ideas" we wouldn't be having this conversation.
        scarejunba 8y ago
        Hang on, just to check, which of the specific things called out as "bad ideas" do you take issue with?
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? This is a bad faith argument. I say so because the purported mechanism for such decision-making is actually spelled out upthread, and because this rhetorical question is then followed by a glaring fallacy of composition that seeks to draw a general conclusion from a single and highly over-simplified example.
  - will_dev_4_food 8y ago
    It’s not a silly example but rather a common one. Many years ago it was only the fat that were attractive because they were the financially secure. Many believed that royalty were th only form of legitimate government, and colonial activity among “savages” was doing them all a favor. Science, academics, and even personal experience vary with time. Not all variance that follows is truthful...some is exaggerated purposefully or accidentally, though most is considered good information at the time.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      I didn't say it was silly. Please try to differentiate between the quotation that I'm responding to and what I said in response.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    So, the anti-GMO movement, far and away has more blood on its hands than even Alex Jone's dumb theories (see golden rice.) Should we police that speech? I believe anti-GMO is a silly idea, and a deadly one. Far more deadly that Jones claiming Sandy Hook wasn't real, far more deadly than a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Yet, we allow it, in fact in many cases we encourage it on the corporate/company level (see Chipotle.) There are tons of "mom blog" type pages on Facebook that push this crap, it's a much much bigger industry than Jones. Where is the outrage there? Is it ok to ban their speech from a corporate platform? It does way more societal damage. Gwyneth Paltrow pushes things with her company "Goop" that can cause serious health problems. Should we ban her from Facebook? I just wonder where you draw the line, because if we're talking raw statistics on society damage, InfoWars or virtually any form of "hate speech" isn't even in the top 10.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? Any private, non-common-carrier party that is asked to relay it. That is what freedom of speech/press means: people are free to evaluate content and decide for themselves whether to participate in spreading it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- BryantD 8y ago
  I think that's the core question right there. For a while, various governmental bodies got to be the authority figure deciding which ideas were widely propagated. It's interesting to consider the outsized influence of Texas school boards here; the people who decided which textbooks would be used in Texas were elected officials. Texas has a huge textbook market. Accordingly, textbook vendors were incentivized to publish textbooks which fit Texas standards, and other states who didn't have the same influence wound up with those textbooks. So: "who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?" Texas elected officials. That's suboptimal in my view. It is also not great that four or five major companies have the same decision-making power. Fixing the problem is difficult, but I take some comfort in knowing that it's not actually a new problem.
polanon 8y ago
I don't know about moon landing, vaccines or whatever internet stories, but revisionism about gaz chambers and the 6 millions number is heavily documented. I read quite a bit about it to make my own idea and it's... disturbing. And the anti-revisionists do not answer with facts or science, so it's even more "disturbing". Some historians have publicly gave up trying to fight revisionists with facts, because they can't - there is no material to help them. Calling revisionism silly is literally anti-intellectualism. BTW, the only story I want to believe is the MASSIVE CONSPIRACY WITH CHEMTRAILS :D
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  In your understanding, did millions of jews die in the holocaust as part of a German plan to eradicate a race?
  - t3soro 8y ago
    Log-lost diary of German officer Alfred Rosenberg vindicates his testimony at Nuremburg. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-lost-diary-of-nazi-alfred-rosenberg-turned-over-to-holocaust-museum/2013/12/17/b422b260-6738-11e3-8b5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?utm_term=.40b2807dfa0e https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/long-lost-diary-of-nazi... > Scholars had been eager to see what this longtime Nazi from Hitler’s inner circle had to say in the missing journal. But details of the Nazis’ grand plans for genocide and brutal domination are absent from the pages. Rosenberg testified in Nuremberg that there was no such plan for the wholesale murder and eradication of the Jewish race, and that the idea had never even crossed his mind. In other words, the only plans the Germans had was to expel the Jews from their territory. Nonetheless, he was not believed and sentenced to execution by the court.
    - tpush 8y ago
      You missed this parts of the article: > "Rosenberg does occasionally raise the issue of Jews. On March 28, 1941, he referred to the opening conference of his brainchild, the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question. I regard the conference as a success,” Rosenberg wrote. “It is, after all, for the first time in European history, that ten European nations [were] represented at an anti-Jewish conference with a clear program to remove this race from Europe. “And now this perception of a historic necessity is backed up by force.”
ddingus 8y ago
So? Laugh at them, and then contribute facts. Next. At any given time, these things are all part of the conversation. Suppressing them only adds to the allure. Attempting to manage it, "for their own good" will not end well, and it won't end well because way too many people will fail to trust, share that and undermine it all. As they should. That problem is why there is a First Amendment in the first place. I know that does not apply here, and I know why too. Not my intent. The dynamics that lead to having a First Amendment are my point. The moment people begin to mistrust, and that catches fire and spreads is the moment the dialog gets toxic and hostile. See my comment up thread.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  And people like my mother? Who didn't do so well in statistics and science and math and therefore do not have the tools to rationally judge one claim versus another? How do we help them not get pulled into, often alluring and attractive, circles of hate?
  - ddingus 8y ago
    I love you mom, but those people are fucking clowns. How can I help? (Have had this exact exchange. Took a while, but did resolve. Human problems take human work.)
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Lane Davis's dad tried that approach, arguing to his son that he (the son) had fallen down a neo-nazi rabbit hole. Davis denounced his dad as a 'leftist pedophile' and stabbed him to death. I could supply a laundry list of examples, but the basic point I'd like to communicate is that once someone signs up to an eliminationist philosophy we have (to misquote Churchill) established what they are, and the only question is in what order they intend to pursue that project. I want to be careful here to distinguish between ideas that mre merely wrong and those that involve imposition of their calculus upon others. For example, I consider flat earthers ridiculous but it's not like they are threatening to flatten out anything they consider overly curved.
partiallypro 8y ago
Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Generally the people who post this stuff are the people already preconditioned to believe it. These people also have their views emboldened when they see it is banned...they view it as some conspiracy to hide the "truth." IMO, these bans against Alex Jones aren't going to have the good intended result they were meant to. If anything, this could drive more direct ad dollars to him and allow him to expand into another vertical that may attract and empower even more like him. But I'm biased, I am generally against any form of censorship unless it is exploiting someone against their will (see snuff films, pedophilia, etc.) Slightly unrelated, but I fear that the Russian boogeymen is going to creep its way into outright censorship in the West via corporate America...which ironically is an outcome Putin and other Western adversaries desire.
- acdha 8y ago
  > Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Do you have a citation for that? It seems unlikely that the Internet didn’t increase the reach for fringe views by making them available to everyone rather than just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Are you really suggesting that conspiracy theories such as JFK, Roswell, Area 51, Antivaccine/"mark of the beast," Moonlanding, Big Foot etc weren't already in popular culture before the internet was popularized? Because, in fact, many of them spread because there was no wide usage of the internet (Roswell, probably being the #1.) It helps create lore. Even X-Files, a show that I adore, was really pre-popularized internet era. Think of Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc. Those conspiracy theories led to the Oklahoma City bombing. And they were widespread prior to the internet being a big thing. Think of the Turner Diaries which was big in the early 90s, there are too many examples to even list. 9/11 was maybe the first popular internet spread conspiracy, but I would make a strong argument that without the internet it may have been more widespread because there is less online debunks. I don't know if you've ever argued with a conspiracy theorist but their minds were made up before any major theory was proposed. It's a natural distrust of authority. Do I have hard data? No, and I am willing to be that it would be incredibly hard to measure that anyhow, but I do have tons of anecdotes and history to back up the claim that it's nothing new. It's human nature.
Turing_Machine 8y ago
> A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage Worst idea that still holds traction and has caused actual damage: Marxism. >100 million people murdered so far, and it's still going strong. If we're going to start banning bad ideas from the Internet, maybe we should start with that one.
- spaginal 8y ago
  Amen.

ddingus 8y ago

Thought experiment for you: Say we remove Qanon from all platforms of reputable note. Do you believe 4chan would ever comply? Secondly, what impact does that have on the reputable platforms vs 4chan? How does that all break down for people? My thoughts are: 1. 4chan will continue very liberal speech. People will continue to visit, and those numbers will increase due to the Streisand effect. 2. The number one and two responses to Alex Jones recent and wide spread ban are: Who is next? FINALLY! And those trend along authoritarian lines most clearly. Anti authoritarians are more critical and make it clear they do not need to be protected from bad speech. Authoritarians make it clear they value said protection because of what could happen. I bet the same happens with QAnon, should that decision get made. Net outcome: Polarization along authoritarian lines. Frankly, I think Jones is laughable. I also think specific speech he made should be removed because it is defamatory and or inciting in nature. I think a blanket, "fuck this guy" is a grave error. I think that because: The answer to bad speech is more speech, and post removal is a form of speech, given it is used where speech is actually criminal. And it is understandable too. Bans are not those things and can create martyrs as well as augment attention to other platforms where fans, supporters will quickly gather to discuss injustice. I think the laughable should be laughed at too. Civility is difficult here. Forcing that, as in nobody gets offended, dilutes speech down, and prevents "more speech" from working as it should. That all forms a resonant cycle we probably will not like very much. At the root of all this is forced trust and an abandonment of safe harbor. That will not be easy to undo, and it will divide people into those authoritarian vs non authoritarian camps too. I gotta be honest and will gladly side with the anti authoritarians. Do not need the protection, and I have a very, very thick skin. There are few ways to actually impact me, and I do understand my agency in conversation well. I can't control others, but I can control me. Bad speech from clowns and asses is entertainment. It isnt something I give weight to. Nobody should. That they do, and that they are enabled with this idea of protection being somehow needed is likely to do more harm than good. Anyway, the Qanon types will find and communicate where the speech is, just as the Alex Jones types will. And then they will share that and martyr status should prove effective in rebuilding the lines of communication, only now we have doubt. Who is next and why? How do people know the difference between corruption and abuse of power / money from a genuine act to manage criminal speech properly? What of things like profanity? More basically, how do people understand they are having a real conversation as opposed to just a permitted, even encouraged one? I want the real conversation and will seek that. Got no time for Disneyland type conversation.

Nadya 8y ago

>I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away. It doesn't make them go away. It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private. If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil. If you refuse to let me speak about vaccines that only further proves that you're evil and trying to hide the truth - and strengthens my indoctrination. Now, poor arguments against anti-vaccers also serve to strength the indoctrination so there's some bad with the good... (Also just to be certain on things: "you" and "I" are used generically for easier writing, I support and believe in vaccines.) There are also plenty of bad ideas that do die to public scrutiny - think of anytime anyone has ever been talked out of "doing something stupid" because they shared what they had planned to do.

BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
> If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil Understand that forcing vile ideas into obscurity and forcing people to only ever see vile ideas are not even close to being the same thing. You could even say that they're almost opposites.
BryantD 8y ago
> It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private. This does not appear to be the case. Consider the math, if nothing else: Bad Idea Public convinces .1% of those who hear it and those people are irrationally convinced. Bad Idea Private convinces 10% of those who hear it and those people are likewise irrationally convinced. I'm assuming the private bad idea is 100 times as effective, which may or may not be accurate. Even so, as long as your private circles are smaller than ten million people or so, we're better off than we would be if your bad idea was hitting a billion people on the Internet. I'm still not arguing about the difficulty of telling which ideas are good and which are bad.

pdkl95 8y ago

> logical refutation doesn't work. It can work, if-and-only-if if it is done after real communication has been established. Most people trying to refute "obviously wrong" ideas skip the first step and start with arguing in a language and framing that they understand. This is noise when the other person uses a fundamentally different framework for what counts as "facts", "evidence", "authority", etc. One of the better explanations of what I'm talking about is this[1] essay. While it discusses the creationist "debate", the ideas about trying to educate people that are resistant to science and logic apply generally. Yes, logical refutation rarely works. However, did you bother to learn their language so there is a foundation of actual communication to build upon? Or did you argue in a language they don't understand? Even worse, did your argument appear to contain a lot of phatic expression that is hostile from their point of view? [1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s/ http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi... (see the heading "Hierarchical View of the World" and "The Problem of Language" for the main argument)