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Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct info

Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.

zaroth 7y ago
Exactly this. Therefore it logically follows that democracy depends on access to incorrect information. Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
jacksnipe 7y ago
Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content? That is a terrifying argument.
  - damontal 7y ago
    pre internet weren't the masses spoonfed okayed information by network tv and newspapers?
  - prepend 7y ago
    Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used. I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!). I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      It's not a binary switch. The government frequently regulates entities and restricts them, especially large monopolistic ones - "Hey Spectrum, you can't impose bandwidth caps because you swallowed all the competition". There's no reason the Government can't allow Twitter to still operate as a private, for profit platform (Capitalism) and restrict their limiting or banning of accounts (recognizing that they're used widely for disseminating official policy positions and governmental information among other things and there's no competition). What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
  - zuminator 7y ago
    Even if one were in favor of unfettered access to information generally, it doesn't logically follow that an individual publisher such as Twitter is obliged to offer or facilitate unfettered access. The WSJ isn't obliged to offer access to fake stock listings alongside the real ones. And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either. Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      That's a straw man to suggest anyone is arguing for divulging all passwords or pins. Likewise no one is arguing twitter should facilitate access to PHI, etc. There's a clear and obvious difference between political statements and passwords and its bad faith to argue otherwise. The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs. So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
  - nsxwolf 7y ago
    Who? People who believe as I do politically, of course.
  - jacksnipe 7y ago
    I’m not sure what the solution is — it’s possible to identify a problem (that humans don’t seem to be able to properly process the amount of information we currently have access to) without knowing the solution. I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss. But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  Is it okay to put plans for building nuclear centrifuges on the internet? No.
  - nradov 7y ago
    There are hundreds of scientific journal articles and patent applications available for nuclear centrifuges. The US government even publishes some of them. Plans alone are useless without the raw materials, parts, and tools.
sascha_sl 7y ago
Nobody is well informed on all issues. You just can't be. You can't fact check everything. We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid) This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham. I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  Precisely, the marketplace of ideas has become the cesspit of lies and we need to pull ourselves and everyone else out of it.
  - mrrrgn 7y ago
    What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from? The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff. A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas. It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
    - sascha_sl 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure people like Steven Crowder do not contribute to any diamond discovery process, can YouTube deplatform/demonetize him yet? And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.
- mrrrgn 7y ago
  A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.
heisenbit 7y ago
And what is access? Access of parties to shove information down my throat? Access for parties with deeper pockets to drown out real information? If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything! But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story. And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks. It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
- nradov 7y ago
  Stop being so dramatic. No one is shoving information down your throat. You can log off Twitter.
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    “You can log off Twitter” is not an argument that is compatible with the idea that Twitter is so important that moderation is tantamount to censorship.
    - nradov 7y ago
      But Twitter isn't that important, so the whole argument is moot.

Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.

zaroth 7y ago

Exactly this. Therefore it logically follows that democracy depends on access to incorrect information. Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>

jacksnipe 7y ago

Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.

vorpalhex 7y ago
So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content? That is a terrifying argument.
- damontal 7y ago
  pre internet weren't the masses spoonfed okayed information by network tv and newspapers?
- prepend 7y ago
  Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used. I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!). I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    It's not a binary switch. The government frequently regulates entities and restricts them, especially large monopolistic ones - "Hey Spectrum, you can't impose bandwidth caps because you swallowed all the competition". There's no reason the Government can't allow Twitter to still operate as a private, for profit platform (Capitalism) and restrict their limiting or banning of accounts (recognizing that they're used widely for disseminating official policy positions and governmental information among other things and there's no competition). What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
- zuminator 7y ago
  Even if one were in favor of unfettered access to information generally, it doesn't logically follow that an individual publisher such as Twitter is obliged to offer or facilitate unfettered access. The WSJ isn't obliged to offer access to fake stock listings alongside the real ones. And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either. Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    That's a straw man to suggest anyone is arguing for divulging all passwords or pins. Likewise no one is arguing twitter should facilitate access to PHI, etc. There's a clear and obvious difference between political statements and passwords and its bad faith to argue otherwise. The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs. So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  Who? People who believe as I do politically, of course.
- jacksnipe 7y ago
  I’m not sure what the solution is — it’s possible to identify a problem (that humans don’t seem to be able to properly process the amount of information we currently have access to) without knowing the solution. I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss. But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
andy_ppp 7y ago
Is it okay to put plans for building nuclear centrifuges on the internet? No.
- nradov 7y ago
  There are hundreds of scientific journal articles and patent applications available for nuclear centrifuges. The US government even publishes some of them. Plans alone are useless without the raw materials, parts, and tools.

sascha_sl 7y ago

Nobody is well informed on all issues. You just can't be. You can't fact check everything. We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid) This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham. I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.

andy_ppp 7y ago
Precisely, the marketplace of ideas has become the cesspit of lies and we need to pull ourselves and everyone else out of it.
- mrrrgn 7y ago
  What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from? The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff. A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas. It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
  - sascha_sl 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure people like Steven Crowder do not contribute to any diamond discovery process, can YouTube deplatform/demonetize him yet? And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.
mrrrgn 7y ago
A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.

heisenbit 7y ago

And what is access? Access of parties to shove information down my throat? Access for parties with deeper pockets to drown out real information? If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything! But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story. And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks. It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.

nradov 7y ago
Stop being so dramatic. No one is shoving information down your throat. You can log off Twitter.
- vertex-four 7y ago
  “You can log off Twitter” is not an argument that is compatible with the idea that Twitter is so important that moderation is tantamount to censorship.
  - nradov 7y ago
    But Twitter isn't that important, so the whole argument is moot.