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Characterizing the state limiting the actions a corporation may take, by regulation, as the state “trusting” the corporation is absurd. Acting like we are talk

Characterizing the state limiting the actions a corporation may take, by regulation, as the state “trusting” the corporation is absurd. Acting like we are talking about nebulously “bad” speech when the primary subject is 1) denial of the factual event of the Holocaust and 2) incitement towards a future Holocaust is deeply insensitive to the present and growing fear of that exact thing. Pretending that any white supremacist or anti-semitic propaganda which comes from a politician must simply be “algorithmically similar to hate speech”, and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning. And somehow we put all of that together to arrive at the dramatic conclusion that... the status quo is fine with me, and nothing should change. It’s a nice speech, mind you. I can’t possibly replace HN with another platform— where else am I going to find such passionately incoherent arguments from the radical middlebrow?

gfodor 7y ago
Algorithmic regulation of speech necessarily requires arguments around global effects, counterfactuals, and long term consequences. Focusing on a specific, extreme example to inductively derive a plan around making platform-wide, global scale, centralized enforcement of speech is something I expect of a child, not an adult. Anyone who has worked on machine learning understands this: if you are going to ignore false positives, it's trivial to make an algorithm with 100% accuracy. The challenge becomes what confusion matrix is acceptable. It's fundamentally impossible to avoid all Type I and Type II errors for anything but the most basic underlying function: I don't think anyone here suspects a system for labelling unacceptable speech is even close to such a problem. In our justice system, we highly prefer to not send the innocent to jail. A similar level of tolerance should be articulated here. It is not being done, and the issue of false positives is largely glossed over by stirring up emotions around extreme examples. This is similar to seeing people getting angry over when a suspected guilty person walks free in an individual case, winning due to proper legal reasons like insufficient evidence to prove guilt. We accept that outcome, not because we want the guilty to be free, but because the system we have designed has made tradeoffs where that outcome can happen in favor of minimizing the liklihood of the innocent from being imprisoned. People should be forced to articulate what degree of non-hate speech they are willing to see silenced in favor of increasing the silencing of hate speech, and those who are happy with the status quo or who are interested in reduced regulation of speech should articulate the degree of acceptable hate speech that is let to continue so non-hate speech will not be inadvertently silenced. > and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning. Nowhere did I state that political speech could not conceivably be hate speech. The inverse proposition, that political speech by politicians that isn't hate speech could be mis-labeled, was my claim. This isn't even a claim, it's self evident if we're talking about having a system that is labeling all instances of online speech as being either hate speech or not. Type I and Type II errors are unavoidable. Arguing the inverse shows you did not understand my logic. My claim is that people who shrug their shoulders at the impact of false positives (like SBC) either underestimate the magnitude of them or are revealing fundamental beliefs about what world they think is acceptable to live in. (Namely, that these platforms should be willing to silence more people today than they are doing already, even if they are innocent, in the name of preventing others who are bad actors.) I'm sure there have been millions of people who have strongly argued in favor of a justice system where you must prove your innocence. A similar tack is being taken when you have people who wouldn't mind seeing people de-platformed who actually were not spreading hate, if it meant less dissemination of actual hate speech. I don't blame celebrities for not understanding the nature of Type I and Type II errors, and the nature of unintended consequences, but I sure as heck expect more from commenters here. And anyway, my point wasn't about what I think ought to be, what but I think will happen inevitably. Due to the Internet, all of these arguments are moot. Unless the government starts packet filtering, there will ultimately be no way to prevent non-illegal speech from spreading rapidly across the globe. I'd rather people focus on what we want the world to look like under a system where any voice can be heard by anyone, and how we can optimize that scenario, instead of focusing on the present-day system where a few centralized actors happen to have these artificial hammers they can use to clamp down the spread of speech. Leveraging those hammers for good or evil will not result in a good, long-term, sustainable outcome, since they are going to eventually evaporate and we will be back exactly where we started, if not in a worse scenario due to solving for the wrong problem.

gfodor 7y ago

Algorithmic regulation of speech necessarily requires arguments around global effects, counterfactuals, and long term consequences. Focusing on a specific, extreme example to inductively derive a plan around making platform-wide, global scale, centralized enforcement of speech is something I expect of a child, not an adult. Anyone who has worked on machine learning understands this: if you are going to ignore false positives, it's trivial to make an algorithm with 100% accuracy. The challenge becomes what confusion matrix is acceptable. It's fundamentally impossible to avoid all Type I and Type II errors for anything but the most basic underlying function: I don't think anyone here suspects a system for labelling unacceptable speech is even close to such a problem. In our justice system, we highly prefer to not send the innocent to jail. A similar level of tolerance should be articulated here. It is not being done, and the issue of false positives is largely glossed over by stirring up emotions around extreme examples. This is similar to seeing people getting angry over when a suspected guilty person walks free in an individual case, winning due to proper legal reasons like insufficient evidence to prove guilt. We accept that outcome, not because we want the guilty to be free, but because the system we have designed has made tradeoffs where that outcome can happen in favor of minimizing the liklihood of the innocent from being imprisoned. People should be forced to articulate what degree of non-hate speech they are willing to see silenced in favor of increasing the silencing of hate speech, and those who are happy with the status quo or who are interested in reduced regulation of speech should articulate the degree of acceptable hate speech that is let to continue so non-hate speech will not be inadvertently silenced. > and could not conceivably be hate speech per se, is the pinnacle of politically motivated reasoning. Nowhere did I state that political speech could not conceivably be hate speech. The inverse proposition, that political speech by politicians that isn't hate speech could be mis-labeled, was my claim. This isn't even a claim, it's self evident if we're talking about having a system that is labeling all instances of online speech as being either hate speech or not. Type I and Type II errors are unavoidable. Arguing the inverse shows you did not understand my logic. My claim is that people who shrug their shoulders at the impact of false positives (like SBC) either underestimate the magnitude of them or are revealing fundamental beliefs about what world they think is acceptable to live in. (Namely, that these platforms should be willing to silence more people today than they are doing already, even if they are innocent, in the name of preventing others who are bad actors.) I'm sure there have been millions of people who have strongly argued in favor of a justice system where you must prove your innocence. A similar tack is being taken when you have people who wouldn't mind seeing people de-platformed who actually were not spreading hate, if it meant less dissemination of actual hate speech. I don't blame celebrities for not understanding the nature of Type I and Type II errors, and the nature of unintended consequences, but I sure as heck expect more from commenters here. And anyway, my point wasn't about what I think ought to be, what but I think will happen inevitably. Due to the Internet, all of these arguments are moot. Unless the government starts packet filtering, there will ultimately be no way to prevent non-illegal speech from spreading rapidly across the globe. I'd rather people focus on what we want the world to look like under a system where any voice can be heard by anyone, and how we can optimize that scenario, instead of focusing on the present-day system where a few centralized actors happen to have these artificial hammers they can use to clamp down the spread of speech. Leveraging those hammers for good or evil will not result in a good, long-term, sustainable outcome, since they are going to eventually evaporate and we will be back exactly where we started, if not in a worse scenario due to solving for the wrong problem.