35 ms·

Freedom of Speech: A Right for Everybody, or Only for Like-Minded People?

147 points by undefined1 6y ago

duxup 6y ago
>The series of studies suggest that cognitive ability is related to support for freedom of speech for groups across the ideological spectrum. It's an interesting result and I have a lot of questions that I think are mostly because I don't understand how studies like this work, but that's kinda a laundry list to throw at a short article like this ;) I do wonder if put to the test if those conclusions hold up. Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window? I suspect that there might be a difference from general support for freedom of speech... and a willingness to also support some contradictory policies / points of view at the same time when fear, or personal interest are at play. History is full of ideology turned to something else entirely. Granted I don't know how you'd test that reliably in any way.
- the8472 6y ago
  The study does not claim unconditional behavior or absence of other factors. Merely a correlation between one attribute and another. So if you build a sufficiently extreme scenario then other factors may eventually overpower that preference. But the correlation would still suggest that the threshold at which one would abandon support for free speech would be different.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Yeah I'm not really taking issue with what the study does or doesn't say. More a hypothetical about what happens in a more every day setting.
- staplers 6y ago
  I do wonder ... Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window? Anecdotally, my view of 2A rights completely flipped once I saw police attacking people in their homes and property for no other reason than filming protests. I used to (naively) think the police and government were generally passive to citizens even when politically differing. It's amazing how quickly the illusion can be shattered.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    So you support shooting at the police?
    - aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
      theyre much less likely to extrajudically execute somebody with a gun, for starters
      - duxup 6y ago
        How does that work exactly? If anything there are tons of examples where the presence of a gun played a big part in the shooting ...
        amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        Maybe it depends on how many guns you have? See the Malheur wildlife refuge takeover for instance.
        duxup 6y ago
        Not all of them avoided being killed ... In general suppose an armed mob has some level of protection, for a little while, but I'm not sure it is much of a solution.
      - hackissimo123 6y ago
        The family of Philando Castille might disagree with you.
    - staplers 6y ago
      Do you support the police shooting at citizens on their own property?
  - JoeSmithson 6y ago
    What's the logic here? How does police brutality and 2A relate? Police are aggressive and corrupt, so you get a gun, so...?
- 6510 6y ago
  I've been toying with peoples lack of imagination all my life. The cognitive ability test involves verbal, numerical, abstract and logical tests. Lets call them people with higher disposable income, at least some leisure time and of course head-space. Not very interesting. The opposite however (people with insufficient money, no time for anything and no room in their head) doesn't make a lack of patience with "bullshit" very surprising. (what they perceive as bullshit) My experiment (more of a stress test) for academics is to debate them in the context of Mathmagics being nonsense (-2*-2=4 ! LOL!), Physics being nonsense (Conservation of energy? So, no universe?), Ufology and alien abduction, flat-earth, Perpetual motion, Water fueled cars, Fomenco's new chronology, More advanced historic civilizations, Forbiding Archeology, Out of body experiences, Near death experiences, Remote viewing, Reincarnation, Royal Rife, etc etc. I pretend not to have an opinion on those and insist that we should let the evidence speak for it self and let the lack of evidence suspend a conclusion. For a lot of trained professionals the mere mention of [say] Sheldrake renders them unable to debate. It isn't a prank, don't mean to troll anyone. It is an exercise in objectivity. History and science are full of truly hilarious stories. It doesn't mean they are unworthy of debate or must be wrong. The funniest was a NASA guy who first got really angry but when I suggested real space travel requires "impossible" physics, therefore: to dismiss impossible claims out-right is to rule out space travel - by convention. He flipped 180 degrees. A truly impressive feat that I much admire.
EGreg 6y ago
WHAT EXACTLY IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH? My view on freedom of speech is different from most I found, but I think it’s the one that is consistent and stays true to actual definitions of words. Human freedoms are about what the human can do. Right to bear arms. Right to speak. Right to assemble. And so on. That is how the Bill of Rights seems to intend it. Note that the freedom to physically say anything and not get carted away is different than that of an organization. Corporations may be “persons” for the purpose of suing and being sued in court etc. But when it comes to freedom of speech, it is quite another level of indirection! When Sinclair TV buys a bunch of local stations, and makes them say something, they are not really free. They are saying whatever they are being told to say: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433/video-reveals-power-of-sinclair-as-local-news-anchors-recite-script-in-unison https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433... But here is the proper description: freedom of speech is different than access to a megaphone that an organization with a large audience gives you. And I prefer that our news and announcements would be run more like Wikipedia than FOX, CNN or even Twitter. Because the latter tear apart our society. News outlets were disrutped by the Internet so they adjusted by locking in an audience by choosing a side and publishing clickbait. And social media in their race to the bottom for advertising dollars herded us into echo chanbers around this content. The current political fever pitch is NOT an accident or a plan by any one person. What can we do instead? Run it like Wikipedia. Think of concentric circles. The smallest circle is what certain groups of mutually distrusting / disagreeing experts / pundits discussing things. They are the ones to go and publish dissenting opinions. This is analogous to the Talk page on Wikipedia. This circle of people get a notification every time that one of them posts, so they can add their 2 cents. Then once enough of them have weighed in, the next level is opened up — which is either the public or an intermediate circle of fact-checkers or news organizations. I do not think the public should get stuff unfiltered from the megaphone of anyone with a Twitter audience of 50,000 or a podcas audience of 40,000. Sure, we are not used to this kind of society, but it is NOT a FREEDOM of speech issue. It is an issue of access to megaphones. The current understanding of “freedom of speech” leads to contradictions and idiosynchrasies where one side claims that Facebook, Twitter are private platforms and aren’t covered under the Bill of Rights, while another side says that they are larger than many countries and are directly distributing speech on their platform. Whether these are “online countries” or not and whether they are subject to the US Bill of Rights because they are located here or operate here is up for debate. But under my definition the forced restructuring of how information is disseminated to wider and wider audiences wouldn’t be a Freedom of Speech issue. PS: By the way, what I described is how news desks used to be run, with various editors being involved before things went to press.
variable11 6y ago
Wow, no way this could be politically motivated conclusions based on falsified data, that never happens in so-called social sciences. Like a good apparatchik, this guy is providing pseudo-scientific ammo to the elites to repress anyone who disagrees with their agenda.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
"Now that the show is over, and we have jointly exercised our constitutional rights, we would like to leave you with one very important thought: Some time in the future, you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a so-called obscenity case. It would be wise to remember that the same people who would stop you from viewing an adult film may be back next year to complain about a book, or even a TV program. If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. Defend your constitutionally protected rights - no one else will do it for you. Thank you."
- imustbeevil 6y ago
  A website owner's right to choose what to publish is a more important application of the first amendment than anyone else's right to force you to publish their speech. If you disagree, I command you to post this post on your twitter. If you don't, you're censoring me.
  - Navarr 6y ago
    100% this. A website is exercising their own freedom of speech when choosing not to publish or carry something. If we oppose this idea then we need to create an alternative to that monopoly. Either in the private, or the public sector.
    - hackissimo123 6y ago
      Hypothetically, let's suppose that the entire Internet was controlled by one private company. (This is very plausible - I see no reason why couldn't have developed this way if history had gone slightly differently; in fact I think it's a miracle that it didn't.) Would you be okay with that private company unilaterally deciding which political opinions were worthy of publishing, even if it was their full legal right to do so? I'm not a free speech absolutist and I fully agree that not everything that people publish on (say) Twitter should be allowed to stay on Twitter. The problem is the growing centralisation of power and the lack of democratic oversight. One day everyone who currently works at Twitter will be dead, but Twitter may still exist, staffed by a completely different bunch of people. Can you be so sure that the reins will always remain in hands you approve of? I don't know what the solution is to the problem of centralised private power to control the internet, but it baffles me that anyone could deny that it is a problem.
wafn 6y ago
If cognitive ability is suddenly a valid scientific metric for sociology, there's going to be a lot of backpedalling and mental gymnastics to account for other studies.
DanielBMarkham 6y ago
From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. More concisely, looking back through history a lot of those times we got so upset about people saying various things, we were wrong. Those people changed all of us for the better. Unless we continue to humbly think we could continue to be wrong, we stop evolving. Cue curtain. There's no way to have difficult societal discussions and fight for the moral and right thing for all of us if we're constantly going to use current group consensus as a measure of what can be said or not. That's not progress. That's a popularity contest.
- yomly 6y ago
  Once upon a time "the root of two is an irrational number" was heresy and the proponents were killed for blasphemy.
  - DanielBMarkham 6y ago
    There has been a long list of assholes that people would have gladly shut up at the time that turned out to change us all for the better. Galileo, for instance, wasn't known as the nicest guy. He basically wrote a book calling the pope an idiot. (The guy probably wasn't a genius, but Galileo could have made his point without going that far) Offhand I could come up with a list of dozen people who were widely unliked by the folks in charge that were critical to our advancement. Oddly, many times the more unpleasant people found their personality, the more important the change eventually brought. They killed Socrates. ADD: Related fun read for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activists/dp/0143108115 https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activ...
  - baddox 6y ago
    But whether the root of two actually is an irrational number does not depend on whether you are free to say it is or isn't. In other words, freedom of speech does not mean that there is no way to make any discernments whatsoever between the speech "the root of two is irrational" and "the root of two is rational."
contrapunter 6y ago
Speech isn't free. It's a form of action and actions are constrained. As the West changes from a Christian to a post-Christian culture, one set of blasphemy laws are being replaced by another set. One set of words you can't say in public by another. Thoughts, on the other hand, are sometimes free. That's one reason the promulgation of despair is continually attempted: to shut down free thought.
JakeCohen 6y ago
The right of freedom of speech is the ability to express any political opinion. This was the historical and traditional understand of the right, and it’s why the founders protected that right under the constitution. Using the 1st amendment to justify selling pornography is an outrageous and blatant manipulation of the words of the constitution. 1A was never historically understood to protect degeneracy. Pornography isn’t a political opinion (except in the most abstract and meaningless sense) and it should be universally banned. Full stop.
- aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
  Bad troll.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  How is the bit about porn relevant to our discussion?
Vysero 6y ago
Imo, it's an unalienable right for everybody, but that doesn't mean cancel culture won't #$(% on you for speaking your belief. However, sometimes you have to say what you believe in even if you know you are going to be shamed for it. Perhaps this would be a good time for us all to go re-read The Scarlet Letter, eh?
- isbjorn16 6y ago
  Ugh. Can we stop with the cancel culture narrative? When people say objectionable things, there may be consequences. This unhinged proposition that you should have an invincibility force field around you when you spit out obnoxious shit is absurd. If you say something people don't like, they may want nothing to do with you. They may want nothing to do with people associated with you. Those people may be your employer. Your employer may not agree with the stuff you say AND you're harming them. Thus, your relationship is terminated. Nobody is being victimized here. Everyone's rights are being upheld and maintained. If my employer hated this comment enough to fire me, then onward I go to another employer, or onward to destitution. If I'm not confident that what I say is mainstream enough that I could be fired for it, then I shouldn't say it, or I should accept that I'm not mainstream enough and thus can't attempt to live in mainstream society. Arguments against "cancel culture" fundamentally mean that people should be forced to have a relationship with me they may not want even if I'm an objectionable, reprehensible twat, and that's too bad for them, because my position is somehow more important than their right to freely associate. I reject this utterly.
  - dx87 6y ago
    > If you say something people don't like, they may want nothing to do with you. They may want nothing to do with people associated with you. Those people may be your employer. Your employer may not agree with the stuff you say AND you're harming them. Thus, your relationship is terminated. If it stopped at people they were actually associated with, then you may have a point. That's not the reality of the situation though, because people will stir up outrage mobs who have no association with you, your employer, your school, etc., and harass them until you are punished for what you said.
jimbob45 6y ago
The two dead comments below are right. The premise of the article is that people who scored higher on IQ tests tended to be more likely to support free speech. That’s got to be the laziest argument I’ve ever seen.
- daenz 6y ago
  It wasn't even an IQ test. According to the paper, they gave participants 10 words, with each word being presented with 5 other words. They were instructed to match each of the 10 target words with the closest of the 5 words. The claim is that vocabulary knowledge is highly correlated with general intelligence, and so this simple test is a proxy for cognitive ability.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  There is some irony in your comment, since you provide no reasoning to your conclusion. Is the study flawed in some way?
HissingMachine 6y ago
I would find interesting if someone conducted a study, where they asked if the participant supports freedom of speech for various categories and their perceived ability to argue pro and con in that category, if it was possible to test their argumentation ability in said categories it would be also insightful. Mostly I suspect that while people hold strong beliefs, they don't have a deep enough understanding of it to rationalize why and argue if someone disagrees with them. In addition it would be interesting to know the participants readiness to enter an argument if they support the freedom of speech in each category.
MattGaiser 6y ago
My self-check on restricting freedoms is whether I would let someone I ardently oppose have the same power.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  This times a million. "If you invent a weapon, eventually your enemies will have it."
ulucs 6y ago
The funny thing is, the shift of accepting the existence "unacceptable" speech hurts liberal speech more than conservative speech (I looked at the numbers from https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec...). Considering how people chasing cancellings on twitter tend to hold extreme opinions themselves, they actively contribute to the thinning of the ice they're walking on.
jheitmann 6y ago
The speech that should absolutely be abridged is using the phrase "Freedom of Speech: A Right" seemingly without referring to the U.S. constitutional right, and also without defining what you mean otherwise. The penalty for violating this law shall be that you have to read every single forum comment about your abstract.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  Communication is not a one-person activity--some of the burden of communication lies on the listener/reader/etc. If you have questions about what someone means, ask them. It's unrealistic to demand that people somehow foresee your questions and answer them without you having to ask.
- DenisM 6y ago
  I was going to downvote your post in contemptuous anger, but your ideas for the penal system reform have completely captured my attention. I'm only part-joking, too. Can we get to a better society by punishing transgressions with an obligation to read and summarize opposing views? There's a thought... It seems a bit too close to the Communist indoctrination methods (read Marx, write essay, repeat for several years), but maybe a botched implementation should not completely discourage us from finding a working one.
andrewprock 6y ago
I'm not sure heterodox academy is worth the paper it is printed on. The article itself attempts to make some kind of vague argument about cognitive ability and social positions. Any time a blogger trots out cognitive ability as one of their primary evidentiary threads, you can be fairly certain that the rest of what you read will largely consist of confirmation bias from the privileged class.
- aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
  heterodox academy: the publisher for people who were bullied in private school
- nabilhat 6y ago
  Just this morning I was thinking about the increasing volume of propaganda, trolling, and heterodox/'edgy' I've been seeing on HN in the last couple of months. Now here we are with a piece suggesting that cognitive superiority or inferiority relates to subjects like "homosexuals", "communists", "anti-american Muslim clergy", and it's on the front page.
hirundo 6y ago
Alternative causality chain: 1. The more politically powerless you feel, the more you support free speech in order to protect speech you agree with. 2. More intelligent people are more likely to land in less politically powerful ideologies, just due to exploring more of them. The graph showing that "Communist" most favor free speech and "Military" supports it least seems to be consistent with a political power gradient. A prediction of this explanation: As power shifts, e.g. as leftists come to dominate academia, the group gaining power will tend to favor free speech less, and visa versa.
- ivalm 6y ago
  Totally agree, in many academic settings this is already a thing (and I say it as a social democrat!).
- Kephael 6y ago
  Others have noticed this same behavior. 216. Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control [0]. [0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
jungletime 6y ago
Is it ever a good idea to tell someone the worst things about them? I would say maybe, depends on the context, because talking is always preferable to violence. But there does come a point, when talking is just used to organize violence. So clearly there is a line. "Tutsi were increasingly viewed with suspicion; Radio Rwanda aired incitement to ethnic hatred and a pogrom was organised on 11 October in a commune in Gisenyi Province, killing 383 Tutsi." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Civil_War
- jhhh 6y ago
  Inciting imminent lawless action is not covered under the first amendment.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    > So clearly there is a line. So you agree with your parent. > is not covered under the first amendment The 1A doesn't explicitly define its limited uses, but thru jurisprudence, courts have ruled that the 1A only protects American persons within the USA and that it's not an absolute protection, but can be infringed / withdrawn / overridden if it violates the rights of others or the national security interests of the country.
hkt 6y ago
The problem people have with free speech is the way it is used to legitimise bad behaviour. Creating a hostile environment for people - questioning their equality and validity - is not a reasonable moral choice. Being ostracised for one's awful choices isn't unfair or unexpected, or indeed unprecedented. Most people complaining about free speech are essentially campaigning for their right to be cruel and impolite in polite society.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  It certainly would be pleasant if I never heard "abolish Whiteness" ever again, yes, but I am just not so sure how far my feelings should be taken.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  That's a total mischaracterization of people who believe in free speech. I don't think people should say bigoted things. But more importantly, I don't think people should think bigoted things. If you shame and ostracize people into not saying bigoted things, but you don't solve the thinking bigoted things problem, then all you've done is hide the problem, and you're suddenly surprised when a bigot gets elected to the White House or a bigoted police officer murders someone and gets away with it (again). Censored bigots don't magically stop being bigots--they just go form their own communities. The way you get people to stop thinking bigoted things is not by silencing it, it's by explaining to people why they're wrong. Even if you don't change the mind of the bigot you're talking to, you might change the mind of someone else who is listening to or reading what you say. I'm not campaigning for people's right to be cruel and impolite. I'm campaigning for conversation that brings the truth to light and improves our collective thinking. And to be clear, I'm also not saying that free speech means you should have no consequences in any context. If you say something racist at work you should absolutely be fired. I'm saying that we need places where people can say racist things so that those racist things can be confronted with the truth.
  - 6y ago
ditonal 6y ago
In 2020, free speech is most often attacked under three false premises: 1. "It's a private company, they can deplatform whoever they want!" This is obviously true to an extent, but as all communication is increasingly dominated by a few private companies, leads to a situation where free speech is effectively stifled not by the government but by an oligarchy. This is especially true since internet infrastructure like DNS is implemented by private companies. 2. "It's freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences of speech!" Clearly this argument is absurd and wrong, yet I've seen it get touted nonetheless, notably in an XKCD comic. If the government threw you in jail for political speech, and defined that as "allowing free speech but simply having consequences of that speech", most would agree that's not true free speech. Yet people accept that flawed logic in other contexts. If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions. 3. "We can't be tolerant of intolerant opinions!" Again, perhaps some truth here in the most extreme cases, yet increasingly we label all but the most anondyne opinions as intolerant. The range of acceptable opinions gets narrower every day, and the consequences for diverging from it increasingly harsh. To me it's an objective reality that there's a massive attack on free speech in 2020, especially in places like Silicon Valley and primarily by people who identify as "the left", usually using the fallacious arguments noted above.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  > If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions. A hypothetical for you. Let's say you're married to someone. That someone later down the line turns into a massive jerk, frequently spouting obscenities at you and has changed politically. If you divorce them, are you violating their right to freedom of speech? Should we as a society not allow divorces lest they censor someone's opinion?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I have no issue with people being fired or divorced for spouting obscenities. I would certainly think poorly of someone who filed for divorce because their spouse changed politically.
throwaway_jobs 6y ago
I wish people would take the time to read 1st Amendment case law. I think people would be shocked, even when the court get it wrong, the justices and opinions explore the subject in a depth that laymen will go their entire lives never exploring or understanding. Plus the bonus of it being maybe one of the more interesting areas of law factually. Some of the major topics I suggest looking at/googling: -1st amendment restricts the government from infringing speech Not private parties (I.e. you say something about my wife/kids I can shut your mouth, maybe I will face criminal/civil penalties for damaging your face, but not for chilling your speech) -the marketplace of ideas (perhaps my favorite concept in free speech) -government can restrict Speech based on time/location (i.e. require permits for using public spaces or limiting your access to public space such as closing a park at night and arresting you for trespassing preventing you from distributing your speech when/where you want) -“Fuck the draft” (just lol) vs burning draft cards -obscene speech (porn - Imagine the justices Getting together with their popcorn and watching porn together...they still can’t define it, “but they know it when they see it”)...this extends to child porn too I’ll leave it there, have fun!
- vmception 6y ago
  The psychology behind the Supreme Court is interesting too. They seek compliance with their orders and won't rule in a way that nobody expects. They will rule in a way that many people disagree with, but it will match a possibility everyone had in mind, or they won't take the case at all. They don't want constitutional amendments, or the need to revisit cases over and over again because the people and the states aren't satisfied. They are fine with the legislature simply changing narrowly tailored laws to avoid people from encountering the disagreement again. So you see this in obscenity. It won't ever clarify this because it doesn't match the social contract people have with the government anymore. ie. Gore and explicit sex is so commonplace in media that it will never clarify.
  - throwaway_jobs 6y ago
    One of my favorite phrases comes from the obscenity cases, and I tend to use it as often as I can: “Appeals to (Your) prurient interests” Many other jokes to be made at the expense of the justices on these cases, Which get far dirtier, such as the pinnacle case being Miller v California which was essentially about mail order dildos/sex toys, one would have thought double-sided dildos were about as obscene as it gets at the time, and yet leave it to the justices to develop the Miller Test which is coincidentally a “three-prong Obscenity test”.
fomojola 6y ago
You can say whatever you want: you should also expect to take heat from non-like minded people. At some point the free speech concept transitioned to "I should be able to say whatever I want with no consequences". The First Amendment is very specific: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Says nothing about any one else's responses to your words.
- kerkeslager 6y ago
  Free speech is important even in contexts where the First Amendment doesn't apply. The First Amendment is important because free speech is important, not the other way around. I agree with this: You can say whatever you want: you should also expect to take heat from non-like minded people. But I think this misrepresents the view of free speech advocates (it certainly misrepresents my viewpoint): At some point the free speech concept transitioned to "I should be able to say whatever I want with no consequences". On the contrary, I think a lot of left-authoritarians who want to censor right-leaning speech are the ones touting this viewpoint. It's not the pro-free-speech crowd that wants no consequences for what they say, it's the anti-free-speech crowd. One of the consequences of stating your opinion publicly is that people will disagree with you.
  - ping_pong 6y ago
    The left fascists believe "if you disagree anything I say, then you are the enemy". The recent Tabbiti article <https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself> https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i... talks about how a journalist who didn't even espouse an opinion, but merely quotes a black activist about black-on-black crime, was subject to a massive attack as if the journalist himself was a racist. The left truly believe if you don't tow the line 100%, then you are an enemy. It's a fascist hivemind mentality. I can't find the article now, but there was someone who went through what statements hockey teams made about George Floyd and Black Lives Matters, and had a checklist making sure that all of the boxes were checked in terms of what was "acceptable". If they didn't fulfill every single checkbox they were maligned. If this isn't fascism by definition, I don't know what is. It's shocking how extreme things are getting. Those of us such as myself who are progressives have no moral high ground over the white supremacists if the fascist left use the exact same tactics that they do. The problem is more and more progressives are using the same tactics. I've been in the Bay Area for over 20 years and have never heard of Juneteenth ever. I have a friends from Louisiana who have never heard of Juneteenth either. The only friend that had heard of it grew up in Texas, where the holiday originated. When I responded in a reddit post that I never heard it before, I was referred to as a racist. It's getting crazy out there now.
daenz 6y ago
Interesting and totally tone-deaf timing for this article, given the current climate of the world ("Post a black square on your social media or you are committing violence with your silence.")
RegnisGnaw 6y ago
The simple truth is that most people like "free speech" as long as they agree with it.
honkycat 6y ago
"heterodox academy" Seems like a bunch of conservative hacks trying to launder their beliefs through the language used by liberal types ( whose "safe spaces" campaigning and constant woke-scolding I am not particularly fond of either... but I know whose side I am on. ) . That someone would try to trot out "cognitive ability" as support for "free speech", aka supporting "heterodox" viewpoints is laughable. "Science PROVES conservatives are smarter!" Free speech for whom? Safe enough for whom? https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ comes to mind. I realize it is a trite observation, but the fact of the matter some aphorisms contain a lot of wisdom.
seph-reed 6y ago
Ethos, pathos, logos :: social credit, intuition, logic. Each a very reasonable means of surviving, but ethos is by far the strongest. If you fit in which a bunch of things that aren't dead, you'll probably not die. Something about this play-style seems to result in more than just fitting in, but also hating those who don't. If freedom of speech is your ability to say divergent things, being hated for being different is a problem.
AlexMax 6y ago
So I've been sitting in this comment thread for a while and something has been bothering me. I'm noticing two things that are consistently brought up: 1. Free speech as some sort of abstract enlightenment ideal. 2. Cases of clear injustice in our past that stemmed from denial of free speech. But that's not really why this article was posted, was it? It's really part of the ongoing modern conversations we're having around certain groups claiming their free speech rights are being infringed. I think that injustice was done to Galileo, but I'm not going to shed a tear for somebody who was booted from an internet community for arguing that certain races have a lower IQ and LGBT+ folk are degenerates that need to be sterilized, even if they do it in a faux-earnest way.
- s9w 6y ago
  Free speech is only useful if applied to controversial matters. Everything else doesn't need free speech.
  - dlivingston 6y ago
    You're being downvoted but...you're objectively correct. As Noam Chomsky said, "if we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." Or Voltaire: "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
- dilandau 6y ago
  Banning someone from an internet forum or project is one thing. Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter.
  - AlexMax 6y ago
    > Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter. Isn't that also free speech? Or should free speech only apply to the first hypothetical individual stumping for "race realists"?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 6y ago
There are topics we can reason abstractly about well, and topics we cannot. I find when people get to the edge of their abilities in a topic, we tend to fall back on moralizing and personalizing it. The author's link between cognitive ability and liberality towards speech I think can be explained by how cognitive ability is the capability to think abstractly about things using properties and categories, and not explained using the implication that believing in certain rights is a proxy for smart. The speech and tolerance question is hyper-personalized because the tools for reasoning abstractly about it have a steep learning curve. Some of the most educated people I know hold objectively extreme political views because I think it's something they don't really consider in the abstract, and expressing those views is a sympathetic outlet for other personalized anxieties. Ultimately I think political discussion is something they engage in for excitement and entertainment, and so they aren't held to the same level of intellectual rigor in it as they are in their chosen fields of expertise. Extreme views become a kind of vice or indulgence because it's exciting to be outraged and engage in recreational conflict - especially when it has no bearing on their real expertise. I'd argue what we may think about freedom of speech doesn't actually matter, as public discourse is no longer about ideas, principle or reason, it's just a power struggle. One that otherwise smart people seem to participate in as intellectual tourists without much thought as to what their impact actually is because it's exciting.
- 6510 6y ago
  I have a lot of different interests. One is to examine the type of people a topic gathers online or the type they become. (hard to tell the difference) Academics usually have platforms and channels that are highly on topic which is an efficient approach but at the same time it rules out all other discussions with the people they know and hang out with online, every day, for decades and (despite ability) keeps their thoughts undeveloped. Our greatest minds have extracted themselves like that from the topics where we badly need them. (like politics)
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I think this hits the nail right on the head, but I think there is more... The point at which theoretical political dogma transition from a recreational debate into a something an intelligent person might feel uncomfortably obligated to place more thought into, is when there are real personal impacts on them. Everyone can talk about universal healthcare as an intellectual concept, but it's not until they finally have the experience in a socialized hospital that they might take the time to wonder about the real merits of a single-payer system (this is a random example - don't get hung up on it). This problem is then amplified by two recent phenomena... 1. The drastic decrease in age of the average political participant. With Reddit as an example, the average age of Reddit users has dropped nearly 1 year for every year over the last ten years. Presumably, Twitter has seen the same demographic shift. This means these politically active users have less education to fall back on, and approach these subjects with more emotion. That leads to more insults and less constructive arguments, and a general intolerance of opposition. 2. International participation. There is a drastic increase in US social media platforms from non-US participants. For those people, the debates are pure recreational debates as they will never see the consequences of any systemic changes. They have no skin in the game, so the most radical options always seem more appealing. ...and of course there is also intentional foreign influence campaigns to polarize online discussions. I think the way out is to rethink how social media is structured. It's causing some very systemic issues.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
GenerocUsername 6y ago
Free speech will and always will be about not taxing speech. The government has no right to tax speech.
mcguire 6y ago
"Cognitive Ability Is Related to Supporting Freedom of Speech for Groups Across the Ideological Spectrum" I don't have access to the paper. How do they define "cognitive ability"?
mdoms 6y ago
The contents of the article has nothing in common with the title.

147 points by undefined1 6y ago

>The series of studies suggest that cognitive ability is related to support for freedom of speech for groups across the ideological spectrum. It's an interesting result and I have a lot of questions that I think are mostly because I don't understand how studies like this work, but that's kinda a laundry list to throw at a short article like this ;) I do wonder if put to the test if those conclusions hold up. Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window? I suspect that there might be a difference from general support for freedom of speech... and a willingness to also support some contradictory policies / points of view at the same time when fear, or personal interest are at play. History is full of ideology turned to something else entirely. Granted I don't know how you'd test that reliably in any way.

the8472 6y ago
The study does not claim unconditional behavior or absence of other factors. Merely a correlation between one attribute and another. So if you build a sufficiently extreme scenario then other factors may eventually overpower that preference. But the correlation would still suggest that the threshold at which one would abandon support for free speech would be different.
- duxup 6y ago
  Yeah I'm not really taking issue with what the study does or doesn't say. More a hypothetical about what happens in a more every day setting.
staplers 6y ago
I do wonder ... Introduce fear, or just personal interests and does that support go out the window? Anecdotally, my view of 2A rights completely flipped once I saw police attacking people in their homes and property for no other reason than filming protests. I used to (naively) think the police and government were generally passive to citizens even when politically differing. It's amazing how quickly the illusion can be shattered.
- pjc50 6y ago
  So you support shooting at the police?
  - aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
    theyre much less likely to extrajudically execute somebody with a gun, for starters
    - duxup 6y ago
      How does that work exactly? If anything there are tons of examples where the presence of a gun played a big part in the shooting ...
      - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        Maybe it depends on how many guns you have? See the Malheur wildlife refuge takeover for instance.
        duxup 6y ago
        Not all of them avoided being killed ... In general suppose an armed mob has some level of protection, for a little while, but I'm not sure it is much of a solution.
    - hackissimo123 6y ago
      The family of Philando Castille might disagree with you.
  - staplers 6y ago
    Do you support the police shooting at citizens on their own property?
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  What's the logic here? How does police brutality and 2A relate? Police are aggressive and corrupt, so you get a gun, so...?
6510 6y ago
I've been toying with peoples lack of imagination all my life. The cognitive ability test involves verbal, numerical, abstract and logical tests. Lets call them people with higher disposable income, at least some leisure time and of course head-space. Not very interesting. The opposite however (people with insufficient money, no time for anything and no room in their head) doesn't make a lack of patience with "bullshit" very surprising. (what they perceive as bullshit) My experiment (more of a stress test) for academics is to debate them in the context of Mathmagics being nonsense (-2*-2=4 ! LOL!), Physics being nonsense (Conservation of energy? So, no universe?), Ufology and alien abduction, flat-earth, Perpetual motion, Water fueled cars, Fomenco's new chronology, More advanced historic civilizations, Forbiding Archeology, Out of body experiences, Near death experiences, Remote viewing, Reincarnation, Royal Rife, etc etc. I pretend not to have an opinion on those and insist that we should let the evidence speak for it self and let the lack of evidence suspend a conclusion. For a lot of trained professionals the mere mention of [say] Sheldrake renders them unable to debate. It isn't a prank, don't mean to troll anyone. It is an exercise in objectivity. History and science are full of truly hilarious stories. It doesn't mean they are unworthy of debate or must be wrong. The funniest was a NASA guy who first got really angry but when I suggested real space travel requires "impossible" physics, therefore: to dismiss impossible claims out-right is to rule out space travel - by convention. He flipped 180 degrees. A truly impressive feat that I much admire.

EGreg 6y ago

WHAT EXACTLY IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH? My view on freedom of speech is different from most I found, but I think it’s the one that is consistent and stays true to actual definitions of words. Human freedoms are about what the human can do. Right to bear arms. Right to speak. Right to assemble. And so on. That is how the Bill of Rights seems to intend it. Note that the freedom to physically say anything and not get carted away is different than that of an organization. Corporations may be “persons” for the purpose of suing and being sued in court etc. But when it comes to freedom of speech, it is quite another level of indirection! When Sinclair TV buys a bunch of local stations, and makes them say something, they are not really free. They are saying whatever they are being told to say: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433/video-reveals-power-of-sinclair-as-local-news-anchors-recite-script-in-unison https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433... But here is the proper description: freedom of speech is different than access to a megaphone that an organization with a large audience gives you. And I prefer that our news and announcements would be run more like Wikipedia than FOX, CNN or even Twitter. Because the latter tear apart our society. News outlets were disrutped by the Internet so they adjusted by locking in an audience by choosing a side and publishing clickbait. And social media in their race to the bottom for advertising dollars herded us into echo chanbers around this content. The current political fever pitch is NOT an accident or a plan by any one person. What can we do instead? Run it like Wikipedia. Think of concentric circles. The smallest circle is what certain groups of mutually distrusting / disagreeing experts / pundits discussing things. They are the ones to go and publish dissenting opinions. This is analogous to the Talk page on Wikipedia. This circle of people get a notification every time that one of them posts, so they can add their 2 cents. Then once enough of them have weighed in, the next level is opened up — which is either the public or an intermediate circle of fact-checkers or news organizations. I do not think the public should get stuff unfiltered from the megaphone of anyone with a Twitter audience of 50,000 or a podcas audience of 40,000. Sure, we are not used to this kind of society, but it is NOT a FREEDOM of speech issue. It is an issue of access to megaphones. The current understanding of “freedom of speech” leads to contradictions and idiosynchrasies where one side claims that Facebook, Twitter are private platforms and aren’t covered under the Bill of Rights, while another side says that they are larger than many countries and are directly distributing speech on their platform. Whether these are “online countries” or not and whether they are subject to the US Bill of Rights because they are located here or operate here is up for debate. But under my definition the forced restructuring of how information is disseminated to wider and wider audiences wouldn’t be a Freedom of Speech issue. PS: By the way, what I described is how news desks used to be run, with various editors being involved before things went to press.

variable11 6y ago

Wow, no way this could be politically motivated conclusions based on falsified data, that never happens in so-called social sciences. Like a good apparatchik, this guy is providing pseudo-scientific ammo to the elites to repress anyone who disagrees with their agenda.

CoolGuySteve 6y ago

"Now that the show is over, and we have jointly exercised our constitutional rights, we would like to leave you with one very important thought: Some time in the future, you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a so-called obscenity case. It would be wise to remember that the same people who would stop you from viewing an adult film may be back next year to complain about a book, or even a TV program. If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. Defend your constitutionally protected rights - no one else will do it for you. Thank you."

imustbeevil 6y ago
A website owner's right to choose what to publish is a more important application of the first amendment than anyone else's right to force you to publish their speech. If you disagree, I command you to post this post on your twitter. If you don't, you're censoring me.
- Navarr 6y ago
  100% this. A website is exercising their own freedom of speech when choosing not to publish or carry something. If we oppose this idea then we need to create an alternative to that monopoly. Either in the private, or the public sector.
  - hackissimo123 6y ago
    Hypothetically, let's suppose that the entire Internet was controlled by one private company. (This is very plausible - I see no reason why couldn't have developed this way if history had gone slightly differently; in fact I think it's a miracle that it didn't.) Would you be okay with that private company unilaterally deciding which political opinions were worthy of publishing, even if it was their full legal right to do so? I'm not a free speech absolutist and I fully agree that not everything that people publish on (say) Twitter should be allowed to stay on Twitter. The problem is the growing centralisation of power and the lack of democratic oversight. One day everyone who currently works at Twitter will be dead, but Twitter may still exist, staffed by a completely different bunch of people. Can you be so sure that the reins will always remain in hands you approve of? I don't know what the solution is to the problem of centralised private power to control the internet, but it baffles me that anyone could deny that it is a problem.

wafn 6y ago

If cognitive ability is suddenly a valid scientific metric for sociology, there's going to be a lot of backpedalling and mental gymnastics to account for other studies.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago

From a meta standpoint, it's interesting to me that the most vociferous deniers of free speech throughout history have made some version of the case "But they're wrong!" (You can add stupid, evil, whatnot. The point is that whatever they're saying, it should not be said because it is not correct) Whereas folks supporting free speech have made the argument: maybe I'm wrong. I don't know everything, and I've been wrong before. More concisely, looking back through history a lot of those times we got so upset about people saying various things, we were wrong. Those people changed all of us for the better. Unless we continue to humbly think we could continue to be wrong, we stop evolving. Cue curtain. There's no way to have difficult societal discussions and fight for the moral and right thing for all of us if we're constantly going to use current group consensus as a measure of what can be said or not. That's not progress. That's a popularity contest.

yomly 6y ago
Once upon a time "the root of two is an irrational number" was heresy and the proponents were killed for blasphemy.
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  There has been a long list of assholes that people would have gladly shut up at the time that turned out to change us all for the better. Galileo, for instance, wasn't known as the nicest guy. He basically wrote a book calling the pope an idiot. (The guy probably wasn't a genius, but Galileo could have made his point without going that far) Offhand I could come up with a list of dozen people who were widely unliked by the folks in charge that were critical to our advancement. Oddly, many times the more unpleasant people found their personality, the more important the change eventually brought. They killed Socrates. ADD: Related fun read for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activists/dp/0143108115 https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Middle-Finger-Heretics-Activ...
- baddox 6y ago
  But whether the root of two actually is an irrational number does not depend on whether you are free to say it is or isn't. In other words, freedom of speech does not mean that there is no way to make any discernments whatsoever between the speech "the root of two is irrational" and "the root of two is rational."

contrapunter 6y ago

Speech isn't free. It's a form of action and actions are constrained. As the West changes from a Christian to a post-Christian culture, one set of blasphemy laws are being replaced by another set. One set of words you can't say in public by another. Thoughts, on the other hand, are sometimes free. That's one reason the promulgation of despair is continually attempted: to shut down free thought.

JakeCohen 6y ago

The right of freedom of speech is the ability to express any political opinion. This was the historical and traditional understand of the right, and it’s why the founders protected that right under the constitution. Using the 1st amendment to justify selling pornography is an outrageous and blatant manipulation of the words of the constitution. 1A was never historically understood to protect degeneracy. Pornography isn’t a political opinion (except in the most abstract and meaningless sense) and it should be universally banned. Full stop.

aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
Bad troll.
MattGaiser 6y ago
How is the bit about porn relevant to our discussion?

Vysero 6y ago

Imo, it's an unalienable right for everybody, but that doesn't mean cancel culture won't #$(% on you for speaking your belief. However, sometimes you have to say what you believe in even if you know you are going to be shamed for it. Perhaps this would be a good time for us all to go re-read The Scarlet Letter, eh?

isbjorn16 6y ago
Ugh. Can we stop with the cancel culture narrative? When people say objectionable things, there may be consequences. This unhinged proposition that you should have an invincibility force field around you when you spit out obnoxious shit is absurd. If you say something people don't like, they may want nothing to do with you. They may want nothing to do with people associated with you. Those people may be your employer. Your employer may not agree with the stuff you say AND you're harming them. Thus, your relationship is terminated. Nobody is being victimized here. Everyone's rights are being upheld and maintained. If my employer hated this comment enough to fire me, then onward I go to another employer, or onward to destitution. If I'm not confident that what I say is mainstream enough that I could be fired for it, then I shouldn't say it, or I should accept that I'm not mainstream enough and thus can't attempt to live in mainstream society. Arguments against "cancel culture" fundamentally mean that people should be forced to have a relationship with me they may not want even if I'm an objectionable, reprehensible twat, and that's too bad for them, because my position is somehow more important than their right to freely associate. I reject this utterly.
- dx87 6y ago
  > If you say something people don't like, they may want nothing to do with you. They may want nothing to do with people associated with you. Those people may be your employer. Your employer may not agree with the stuff you say AND you're harming them. Thus, your relationship is terminated. If it stopped at people they were actually associated with, then you may have a point. That's not the reality of the situation though, because people will stir up outrage mobs who have no association with you, your employer, your school, etc., and harass them until you are punished for what you said.

jimbob45 6y ago

The two dead comments below are right. The premise of the article is that people who scored higher on IQ tests tended to be more likely to support free speech. That’s got to be the laziest argument I’ve ever seen.

daenz 6y ago
It wasn't even an IQ test. According to the paper, they gave participants 10 words, with each word being presented with 5 other words. They were instructed to match each of the 10 target words with the closest of the 5 words. The claim is that vocabulary knowledge is highly correlated with general intelligence, and so this simple test is a proxy for cognitive ability.
koheripbal 6y ago
There is some irony in your comment, since you provide no reasoning to your conclusion. Is the study flawed in some way?

HissingMachine 6y ago

I would find interesting if someone conducted a study, where they asked if the participant supports freedom of speech for various categories and their perceived ability to argue pro and con in that category, if it was possible to test their argumentation ability in said categories it would be also insightful. Mostly I suspect that while people hold strong beliefs, they don't have a deep enough understanding of it to rationalize why and argue if someone disagrees with them. In addition it would be interesting to know the participants readiness to enter an argument if they support the freedom of speech in each category.

MattGaiser 6y ago

My self-check on restricting freedoms is whether I would let someone I ardently oppose have the same power.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hackissimo123 6y ago
This times a million. "If you invent a weapon, eventually your enemies will have it."

ulucs 6y ago

The funny thing is, the shift of accepting the existence "unacceptable" speech hurts liberal speech more than conservative speech (I looked at the numbers from https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/there-is-no-campus-free-speec...). Considering how people chasing cancellings on twitter tend to hold extreme opinions themselves, they actively contribute to the thinning of the ice they're walking on.

jheitmann 6y ago

The speech that should absolutely be abridged is using the phrase "Freedom of Speech: A Right" seemingly without referring to the U.S. constitutional right, and also without defining what you mean otherwise. The penalty for violating this law shall be that you have to read every single forum comment about your abstract.

kerkeslager 6y ago
Communication is not a one-person activity--some of the burden of communication lies on the listener/reader/etc. If you have questions about what someone means, ask them. It's unrealistic to demand that people somehow foresee your questions and answer them without you having to ask.
DenisM 6y ago
I was going to downvote your post in contemptuous anger, but your ideas for the penal system reform have completely captured my attention. I'm only part-joking, too. Can we get to a better society by punishing transgressions with an obligation to read and summarize opposing views? There's a thought... It seems a bit too close to the Communist indoctrination methods (read Marx, write essay, repeat for several years), but maybe a botched implementation should not completely discourage us from finding a working one.

andrewprock 6y ago

I'm not sure heterodox academy is worth the paper it is printed on. The article itself attempts to make some kind of vague argument about cognitive ability and social positions. Any time a blogger trots out cognitive ability as one of their primary evidentiary threads, you can be fairly certain that the rest of what you read will largely consist of confirmation bias from the privileged class.

aa66tt55rr44 6y ago
heterodox academy: the publisher for people who were bullied in private school
nabilhat 6y ago
Just this morning I was thinking about the increasing volume of propaganda, trolling, and heterodox/'edgy' I've been seeing on HN in the last couple of months. Now here we are with a piece suggesting that cognitive superiority or inferiority relates to subjects like "homosexuals", "communists", "anti-american Muslim clergy", and it's on the front page.

hirundo 6y ago

Alternative causality chain: 1. The more politically powerless you feel, the more you support free speech in order to protect speech you agree with. 2. More intelligent people are more likely to land in less politically powerful ideologies, just due to exploring more of them. The graph showing that "Communist" most favor free speech and "Military" supports it least seems to be consistent with a political power gradient. A prediction of this explanation: As power shifts, e.g. as leftists come to dominate academia, the group gaining power will tend to favor free speech less, and visa versa.

ivalm 6y ago
Totally agree, in many academic settings this is already a thing (and I say it as a social democrat!).
Kephael 6y ago
Others have noticed this same behavior. 216. Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control [0]. [0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

jungletime 6y ago

Is it ever a good idea to tell someone the worst things about them? I would say maybe, depends on the context, because talking is always preferable to violence. But there does come a point, when talking is just used to organize violence. So clearly there is a line. "Tutsi were increasingly viewed with suspicion; Radio Rwanda aired incitement to ethnic hatred and a pogrom was organised on 11 October in a commune in Gisenyi Province, killing 383 Tutsi." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Civil_War

jhhh 6y ago
Inciting imminent lawless action is not covered under the first amendment.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > So clearly there is a line. So you agree with your parent. > is not covered under the first amendment The 1A doesn't explicitly define its limited uses, but thru jurisprudence, courts have ruled that the 1A only protects American persons within the USA and that it's not an absolute protection, but can be infringed / withdrawn / overridden if it violates the rights of others or the national security interests of the country.

hkt 6y ago

The problem people have with free speech is the way it is used to legitimise bad behaviour. Creating a hostile environment for people - questioning their equality and validity - is not a reasonable moral choice. Being ostracised for one's awful choices isn't unfair or unexpected, or indeed unprecedented. Most people complaining about free speech are essentially campaigning for their right to be cruel and impolite in polite society.

at_a_remove 6y ago
It certainly would be pleasant if I never heard "abolish Whiteness" ever again, yes, but I am just not so sure how far my feelings should be taken.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 6y ago
That's a total mischaracterization of people who believe in free speech. I don't think people should say bigoted things. But more importantly, I don't think people should think bigoted things. If you shame and ostracize people into not saying bigoted things, but you don't solve the thinking bigoted things problem, then all you've done is hide the problem, and you're suddenly surprised when a bigot gets elected to the White House or a bigoted police officer murders someone and gets away with it (again). Censored bigots don't magically stop being bigots--they just go form their own communities. The way you get people to stop thinking bigoted things is not by silencing it, it's by explaining to people why they're wrong. Even if you don't change the mind of the bigot you're talking to, you might change the mind of someone else who is listening to or reading what you say. I'm not campaigning for people's right to be cruel and impolite. I'm campaigning for conversation that brings the truth to light and improves our collective thinking. And to be clear, I'm also not saying that free speech means you should have no consequences in any context. If you say something racist at work you should absolutely be fired. I'm saying that we need places where people can say racist things so that those racist things can be confronted with the truth.
- 6y ago

ditonal 6y ago

In 2020, free speech is most often attacked under three false premises: 1. "It's a private company, they can deplatform whoever they want!" This is obviously true to an extent, but as all communication is increasingly dominated by a few private companies, leads to a situation where free speech is effectively stifled not by the government but by an oligarchy. This is especially true since internet infrastructure like DNS is implemented by private companies. 2. "It's freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences of speech!" Clearly this argument is absurd and wrong, yet I've seen it get touted nonetheless, notably in an XKCD comic. If the government threw you in jail for political speech, and defined that as "allowing free speech but simply having consequences of that speech", most would agree that's not true free speech. Yet people accept that flawed logic in other contexts. If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions. 3. "We can't be tolerant of intolerant opinions!" Again, perhaps some truth here in the most extreme cases, yet increasingly we label all but the most anondyne opinions as intolerant. The range of acceptable opinions gets narrower every day, and the consequences for diverging from it increasingly harsh. To me it's an objective reality that there's a massive attack on free speech in 2020, especially in places like Silicon Valley and primarily by people who identify as "the left", usually using the fallacious arguments noted above.

fzeroracer 6y ago
> If you can lose your livelihood for a political opinion, you don't really have free speech, yet that's increasingly the precedent set by Silicon Valley as a reasonable consequence of unpopular political opinions. A hypothetical for you. Let's say you're married to someone. That someone later down the line turns into a massive jerk, frequently spouting obscenities at you and has changed politically. If you divorce them, are you violating their right to freedom of speech? Should we as a society not allow divorces lest they censor someone's opinion?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I have no issue with people being fired or divorced for spouting obscenities. I would certainly think poorly of someone who filed for divorce because their spouse changed politically.

throwaway_jobs 6y ago

I wish people would take the time to read 1st Amendment case law. I think people would be shocked, even when the court get it wrong, the justices and opinions explore the subject in a depth that laymen will go their entire lives never exploring or understanding. Plus the bonus of it being maybe one of the more interesting areas of law factually. Some of the major topics I suggest looking at/googling: -1st amendment restricts the government from infringing speech Not private parties (I.e. you say something about my wife/kids I can shut your mouth, maybe I will face criminal/civil penalties for damaging your face, but not for chilling your speech) -the marketplace of ideas (perhaps my favorite concept in free speech) -government can restrict Speech based on time/location (i.e. require permits for using public spaces or limiting your access to public space such as closing a park at night and arresting you for trespassing preventing you from distributing your speech when/where you want) -“Fuck the draft” (just lol) vs burning draft cards -obscene speech (porn - Imagine the justices Getting together with their popcorn and watching porn together...they still can’t define it, “but they know it when they see it”)...this extends to child porn too I’ll leave it there, have fun!

vmception 6y ago
The psychology behind the Supreme Court is interesting too. They seek compliance with their orders and won't rule in a way that nobody expects. They will rule in a way that many people disagree with, but it will match a possibility everyone had in mind, or they won't take the case at all. They don't want constitutional amendments, or the need to revisit cases over and over again because the people and the states aren't satisfied. They are fine with the legislature simply changing narrowly tailored laws to avoid people from encountering the disagreement again. So you see this in obscenity. It won't ever clarify this because it doesn't match the social contract people have with the government anymore. ie. Gore and explicit sex is so commonplace in media that it will never clarify.
- throwaway_jobs 6y ago
  One of my favorite phrases comes from the obscenity cases, and I tend to use it as often as I can: “Appeals to (Your) prurient interests” Many other jokes to be made at the expense of the justices on these cases, Which get far dirtier, such as the pinnacle case being Miller v California which was essentially about mail order dildos/sex toys, one would have thought double-sided dildos were about as obscene as it gets at the time, and yet leave it to the justices to develop the Miller Test which is coincidentally a “three-prong Obscenity test”.

fomojola 6y ago

You can say whatever you want: you should also expect to take heat from non-like minded people. At some point the free speech concept transitioned to "I should be able to say whatever I want with no consequences". The First Amendment is very specific: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Says nothing about any one else's responses to your words.

kerkeslager 6y ago
Free speech is important even in contexts where the First Amendment doesn't apply. The First Amendment is important because free speech is important, not the other way around. I agree with this: You can say whatever you want: you should also expect to take heat from non-like minded people. But I think this misrepresents the view of free speech advocates (it certainly misrepresents my viewpoint): At some point the free speech concept transitioned to "I should be able to say whatever I want with no consequences". On the contrary, I think a lot of left-authoritarians who want to censor right-leaning speech are the ones touting this viewpoint. It's not the pro-free-speech crowd that wants no consequences for what they say, it's the anti-free-speech crowd. One of the consequences of stating your opinion publicly is that people will disagree with you.
- ping_pong 6y ago
  The left fascists believe "if you disagree anything I say, then you are the enemy". The recent Tabbiti article <https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself> https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i... talks about how a journalist who didn't even espouse an opinion, but merely quotes a black activist about black-on-black crime, was subject to a massive attack as if the journalist himself was a racist. The left truly believe if you don't tow the line 100%, then you are an enemy. It's a fascist hivemind mentality. I can't find the article now, but there was someone who went through what statements hockey teams made about George Floyd and Black Lives Matters, and had a checklist making sure that all of the boxes were checked in terms of what was "acceptable". If they didn't fulfill every single checkbox they were maligned. If this isn't fascism by definition, I don't know what is. It's shocking how extreme things are getting. Those of us such as myself who are progressives have no moral high ground over the white supremacists if the fascist left use the exact same tactics that they do. The problem is more and more progressives are using the same tactics. I've been in the Bay Area for over 20 years and have never heard of Juneteenth ever. I have a friends from Louisiana who have never heard of Juneteenth either. The only friend that had heard of it grew up in Texas, where the holiday originated. When I responded in a reddit post that I never heard it before, I was referred to as a racist. It's getting crazy out there now.

daenz 6y ago

Interesting and totally tone-deaf timing for this article, given the current climate of the world ("Post a black square on your social media or you are committing violence with your silence.")

RegnisGnaw 6y ago

The simple truth is that most people like "free speech" as long as they agree with it.

honkycat 6y ago

"heterodox academy" Seems like a bunch of conservative hacks trying to launder their beliefs through the language used by liberal types ( whose "safe spaces" campaigning and constant woke-scolding I am not particularly fond of either... but I know whose side I am on. ) . That someone would try to trot out "cognitive ability" as support for "free speech", aka supporting "heterodox" viewpoints is laughable. "Science PROVES conservatives are smarter!" Free speech for whom? Safe enough for whom? https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ comes to mind. I realize it is a trite observation, but the fact of the matter some aphorisms contain a lot of wisdom.

seph-reed 6y ago

Ethos, pathos, logos :: social credit, intuition, logic. Each a very reasonable means of surviving, but ethos is by far the strongest. If you fit in which a bunch of things that aren't dead, you'll probably not die. Something about this play-style seems to result in more than just fitting in, but also hating those who don't. If freedom of speech is your ability to say divergent things, being hated for being different is a problem.

AlexMax 6y ago

So I've been sitting in this comment thread for a while and something has been bothering me. I'm noticing two things that are consistently brought up: 1. Free speech as some sort of abstract enlightenment ideal. 2. Cases of clear injustice in our past that stemmed from denial of free speech. But that's not really why this article was posted, was it? It's really part of the ongoing modern conversations we're having around certain groups claiming their free speech rights are being infringed. I think that injustice was done to Galileo, but I'm not going to shed a tear for somebody who was booted from an internet community for arguing that certain races have a lower IQ and LGBT+ folk are degenerates that need to be sterilized, even if they do it in a faux-earnest way.

s9w 6y ago
Free speech is only useful if applied to controversial matters. Everything else doesn't need free speech.
- dlivingston 6y ago
  You're being downvoted but...you're objectively correct. As Noam Chomsky said, "if we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." Or Voltaire: "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
dilandau 6y ago
Banning someone from an internet forum or project is one thing. Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter.
- AlexMax 6y ago
  > Trashing a person's reputation and character through a targeted internet campaign (hello Twitter mobs) is another matter. Isn't that also free speech? Or should free speech only apply to the first hypothetical individual stumping for "race realists"?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

motohagiography 6y ago

There are topics we can reason abstractly about well, and topics we cannot. I find when people get to the edge of their abilities in a topic, we tend to fall back on moralizing and personalizing it. The author's link between cognitive ability and liberality towards speech I think can be explained by how cognitive ability is the capability to think abstractly about things using properties and categories, and not explained using the implication that believing in certain rights is a proxy for smart. The speech and tolerance question is hyper-personalized because the tools for reasoning abstractly about it have a steep learning curve. Some of the most educated people I know hold objectively extreme political views because I think it's something they don't really consider in the abstract, and expressing those views is a sympathetic outlet for other personalized anxieties. Ultimately I think political discussion is something they engage in for excitement and entertainment, and so they aren't held to the same level of intellectual rigor in it as they are in their chosen fields of expertise. Extreme views become a kind of vice or indulgence because it's exciting to be outraged and engage in recreational conflict - especially when it has no bearing on their real expertise. I'd argue what we may think about freedom of speech doesn't actually matter, as public discourse is no longer about ideas, principle or reason, it's just a power struggle. One that otherwise smart people seem to participate in as intellectual tourists without much thought as to what their impact actually is because it's exciting.

6510 6y ago
I have a lot of different interests. One is to examine the type of people a topic gathers online or the type they become. (hard to tell the difference) Academics usually have platforms and channels that are highly on topic which is an efficient approach but at the same time it rules out all other discussions with the people they know and hang out with online, every day, for decades and (despite ability) keeps their thoughts undeveloped. Our greatest minds have extracted themselves like that from the topics where we badly need them. (like politics)
koheripbal 6y ago
I think this hits the nail right on the head, but I think there is more... The point at which theoretical political dogma transition from a recreational debate into a something an intelligent person might feel uncomfortably obligated to place more thought into, is when there are real personal impacts on them. Everyone can talk about universal healthcare as an intellectual concept, but it's not until they finally have the experience in a socialized hospital that they might take the time to wonder about the real merits of a single-payer system (this is a random example - don't get hung up on it). This problem is then amplified by two recent phenomena... 1. The drastic decrease in age of the average political participant. With Reddit as an example, the average age of Reddit users has dropped nearly 1 year for every year over the last ten years. Presumably, Twitter has seen the same demographic shift. This means these politically active users have less education to fall back on, and approach these subjects with more emotion. That leads to more insults and less constructive arguments, and a general intolerance of opposition. 2. International participation. There is a drastic increase in US social media platforms from non-US participants. For those people, the debates are pure recreational debates as they will never see the consequences of any systemic changes. They have no skin in the game, so the most radical options always seem more appealing. ...and of course there is also intentional foreign influence campaigns to polarize online discussions. I think the way out is to rethink how social media is structured. It's causing some very systemic issues.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

GenerocUsername 6y ago

Free speech will and always will be about not taxing speech. The government has no right to tax speech.

mcguire 6y ago

"Cognitive Ability Is Related to Supporting Freedom of Speech for Groups Across the Ideological Spectrum" I don't have access to the paper. How do they define "cognitive ability"?

mdoms 6y ago

The contents of the article has nothing in common with the title.