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> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven t

by Legion 6y ago

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked). In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.

totony 6y ago
The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian
- klank 6y ago
  That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.
  - totony 6y ago
    Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.
    - jackson1442 6y ago
      > Murder is quite easy to define Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating. Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
      - klank 6y ago
        Not to mention the fact that our modern definition of murder is based on hundreds of years of trial and error. Is dueling murder? Is killing your slave murder? Is it murder if you get drunk and kill somebody with your car? etc. etc.
      - totony 6y ago
        >Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm. Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is. PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons
        patagurbon 6y ago
        >Requires intent to cause harm Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - NhanH 6y ago
    That's not hyberbole. The difference is that death is well defined, "bad argument" is not.
    - klank 6y ago
      The definition of murder is not simply death. In fact, what counts as murder and what type of murder is quite complex and varies by jurisdiction. It was not as simple as saying "no murder". We arrived at this definition of murder over a long period of time.
- skulk 6y ago
  It's clear to me that our current unprecedented interconnectedness is sending us into a dystopia anyways. 50 more years of this, I simply cannot imagine.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Despite what they show on the news, the situation on Earth is actually improving each year. Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.
    - slumpt_ 6y ago
      Progress is not a straight line, and many things can get better or worse for different subsets of people. This is a generalization that does more harm than good as it minimizes the real trouble people may be facing today or in the near future that they weren’t yesterday.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    "The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy. As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become." Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- louwrentius 6y ago
  It's how the world worked before Facebook and Twitter (fine).
- regularfry 6y ago
  To pretend that there are arguments that it is not socially acceptable to promote is to pretend that the Overton window doesn't exist. Who does that help? People outside it.
  - jessedhillon 6y ago
    You can't think of any ideas which began well outside of the Overton window, but today are commonly accepted as true?
    - regularfry 6y ago
      On the contrary. But it's not reasonable to expect to bring them up without consequences, and specifically in the case of Popper's paradox, those consequences are healthy and those specific ideas should remain unacceptable.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It wasn't when the FCC established standards and it isn't now.
- AgentME 6y ago
  Is it dystopian? There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned, and it doesn't feel very dystopian. I wouldn't come here if this site didn't have that kind of filtering and moderation.
  - jdsalaro 6y ago
    > There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.
    - philosopher1234 6y ago
      He didn’t say it was popular, he said it was not dystopian
- arp242 6y ago
  The idea that every possible opinion should be allowed (and that anything else is "dystopian") is quite recent. Have we forgotten about all the alleged communists being persecuted during the cold war? Or people like Bertrand Russel for "sexual deviancy"? Blasphemy laws? Flag burning laws that were common up to ~20 years ago? etc. etc. etc. There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.
  - AgentME 6y ago
    Er well I think those are all bad examples -- they all seem pretty dystopian to me, a non-straight atheist with some criticisms of capitalism. But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  I find constantly being lied to pretty dystopian. There's a significant cost to parsing, filtering, and refuting lies at both the individual and social levels. Perhaps we should consider trying to quantify that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- staticman2 6y ago
  I find it funny that many people are constantly posting " Twitter censorship bad" on Hackernews, a moderated web site. It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia. I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.
  - jdsalaro 6y ago
    > I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site. Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.
    - philosopher1234 6y ago
      I don’t think hacker news’ guidelines were assembled via consensus... I believe they were mostly a priori and the community formed around them
enraged_camel 6y ago
It also takes far more time and energy to craft good arguments than bad ones. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  So much this. Drives me up the wall in somewhat scientific discussions, e.g. about climate change. A bogus statement is easily made, but disproving it, if you don't already know the answer, is really hard work - sometimes could take weeks of sincere research, if you want to use proper scientific thoroughness. And of course, there are statements which basically cannot be disproved as they are completely discoupled from reality.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Amen to that. Especially since a very popular tactic is to just bombard you with so much nonsense in rapid succession that it simply becomes impossible to discuss (and research!) each and every point. And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.
- pilsetnieks 6y ago
  The so-called bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- gen220 6y ago
  Ideas are edifices, they have to be constructed on a foundation. And, once trusted, they becomem a platform, on top of which more ideas can be constructed. I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual). To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these. So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed. This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field. It's a real conundrum.
handedness 6y ago
Doing the right thing is one thing. At times, doing the right thing and expecting it to work out well is where it becomes naïveté. But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument. Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.
bsza 6y ago
And what makes you think that forcefully silencing such narratives will make those people change their minds? That strategy is also hopelessly naive.
- lou1306 6y ago
  It probably won't, but it makes it harder for such narratives to reach other people that may otherwise get radicalized.
- acdha 6y ago
  Nobody is being “forcibly” silenced. They’re still free to exercise their first amendment rights on their own website, in public spaces, friendly private spaces, etc. What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.
  - bsza 6y ago
    Precisely. And that's what people already do when mainstream social media sites won't host their content. Meaning you can't stop misinformation from spreading, not this way. If anything, you're achieving the OPPOSITE effect by turning people who get cancelled into "martyrs". And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)
    - acdha 6y ago
      You’re missing a big key concept: Trump wasn’t on Twitter because he couldn’t afford a website. He was there because it gave him a much larger audience than would otherwise seek him out. The right-wingers who complain about the terms of service being enforced are doing so because they know they aren’t going to build anywhere near the audience without considerably more work and time.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  Reducing the audience of these narratives can help with reducing their impact. I don't think this is a great solution, but not having people locked into alternate realities in the first place does not seem naive.
jessedhillon 6y ago
What's naive is thinking that anyone, once empowered to define impermissible speech, would not eventually expand that definition to include inconvenient speech. Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Federal courts are already empowered to define impermissible speech, and the worst-case scenario you describe has not happened. This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.
  - jessedhillon 6y ago
    Federal courts are restrained by the defining document of this country, and by the other branches of government. This is literally the reason why all power is not vested into one branch: to restrain each other from the known corrosive effect of power. So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      They have constraints, but yes, by their judgments they define permissible speech. Consider the Larry Flynn obscenity case.
      - jessedhillon 6y ago
        And what restraints are in place on social media or app platforms when they police speech? Only the ones they place on themselves, so this analogy is broken.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that private orgs (not anyone), unconstrained from what constraints they are allowed to apply, will eventually include inconvenient speech. Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.
konjin 6y ago
When we didn't ban these people in the 00s and early 10s we didn't get people attacking the Capitol. Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup. Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Correlation doesn't imply causation. Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position. If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.
  - konjin 6y ago
    > Correlation doesn't imply causation. And it doesn't not imply it. And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      I have no doubt in my mind that if the Charlottesville rally had happened in '02, Bush would not have claimed the are fine people on both sides.
      - konjin 6y ago
        So you're saying that as long as you say the right words you can be as objectively racist as you want? Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?
        shadowgovt 6y ago
shadowgovt 6y ago
It also assumes a fairly-sized platform and counter-platform. Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.
arp242 6y ago
In Dutch we have a saying, which roughly translates to "a lunatic can ask more questions than ten philosophers can answer". I feel it's quite apt here too.
- chj 6y ago
  How can you tell a lunatic from a philosopher? Am I sounding like a lunatic now? You can refuse to answer, but why stop me from asking?
  - willis936 6y ago
    No one stopped anyone from asking. This wasn’t Trump’s first offense; it was his last.
- handedness 6y ago
  Not weighing in on this thread, but just for those who haven't heard of the Gish gallop before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- dijit 6y ago
  “The effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude more than it is to produce it.”
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Also most platforms make sure arguments can only even reach people who are already receptive to them. If you disagree with someone you have almost no chance of getting a message to them unless you privately message them.
colordrops 6y ago
> Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad. We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?
- surbas 6y ago
  “Who watches the watchmen”
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  > We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. I'd like to hear some examples.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    Do you really think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth? If not, which authority should be choosing which information is not ok?
anigbrowl 6y ago
Rationality is only half the issue. Not only are some people extremely irrational, many people are dishonest and knowingly feed bullshit to the irrational people to use them as an amplifier. That can be used to promulgate a false idea, or simply to steal the time of people in refuting it.
lixtra 6y ago
> Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked). How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote? > hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.
ibeckermayer 6y ago
The fact that people can be mistaken, led astray, propagandized, etc. doesn't contradict the original statement that one _should_ counter bad arguments with better arguments. In fact your argument is falling victim to the is-ought fallacy -- Things are a certain way, therefore they shouldn't be another way. The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you. It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.
- brynjolf 6y ago
  Sind he wasn't being censored and better arguments were presented, factual ones, how come we ended up here anyway? You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.
3131s 6y ago
So we should all defer to the superior rationality of who exactly?

by Legion 6y ago

totony 6y ago

The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian

klank 6y ago
That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.
- totony 6y ago
  Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.
  - jackson1442 6y ago
    > Murder is quite easy to define Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating. Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
    - klank 6y ago
      Not to mention the fact that our modern definition of murder is based on hundreds of years of trial and error. Is dueling murder? Is killing your slave murder? Is it murder if you get drunk and kill somebody with your car? etc. etc.
    - totony 6y ago
      >Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm. Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is. PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons
      - patagurbon 6y ago
        >Requires intent to cause harm Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- NhanH 6y ago
  That's not hyberbole. The difference is that death is well defined, "bad argument" is not.
  - klank 6y ago
    The definition of murder is not simply death. In fact, what counts as murder and what type of murder is quite complex and varies by jurisdiction. It was not as simple as saying "no murder". We arrived at this definition of murder over a long period of time.
skulk 6y ago
It's clear to me that our current unprecedented interconnectedness is sending us into a dystopia anyways. 50 more years of this, I simply cannot imagine.
- sneak 6y ago
  Despite what they show on the news, the situation on Earth is actually improving each year. Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.
  - slumpt_ 6y ago
    Progress is not a straight line, and many things can get better or worse for different subsets of people. This is a generalization that does more harm than good as it minimizes the real trouble people may be facing today or in the near future that they weren’t yesterday.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  "The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy. As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become." Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe
louwrentius 6y ago
It's how the world worked before Facebook and Twitter (fine).
regularfry 6y ago
To pretend that there are arguments that it is not socially acceptable to promote is to pretend that the Overton window doesn't exist. Who does that help? People outside it.
- jessedhillon 6y ago
  You can't think of any ideas which began well outside of the Overton window, but today are commonly accepted as true?
  - regularfry 6y ago
    On the contrary. But it's not reasonable to expect to bring them up without consequences, and specifically in the case of Popper's paradox, those consequences are healthy and those specific ideas should remain unacceptable.
shadowgovt 6y ago
It wasn't when the FCC established standards and it isn't now.
AgentME 6y ago
Is it dystopian? There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned, and it doesn't feel very dystopian. I wouldn't come here if this site didn't have that kind of filtering and moderation.
- jdsalaro 6y ago
  > There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.
  - philosopher1234 6y ago
    He didn’t say it was popular, he said it was not dystopian
arp242 6y ago
The idea that every possible opinion should be allowed (and that anything else is "dystopian") is quite recent. Have we forgotten about all the alleged communists being persecuted during the cold war? Or people like Bertrand Russel for "sexual deviancy"? Blasphemy laws? Flag burning laws that were common up to ~20 years ago? etc. etc. etc. There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.
- AgentME 6y ago
  Er well I think those are all bad examples -- they all seem pretty dystopian to me, a non-straight atheist with some criticisms of capitalism. But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.
anigbrowl 6y ago
I find constantly being lied to pretty dystopian. There's a significant cost to parsing, filtering, and refuting lies at both the individual and social levels. Perhaps we should consider trying to quantify that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
staticman2 6y ago
I find it funny that many people are constantly posting " Twitter censorship bad" on Hackernews, a moderated web site. It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia. I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.
- jdsalaro 6y ago
  > I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site. Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.
  - philosopher1234 6y ago
    I don’t think hacker news’ guidelines were assembled via consensus... I believe they were mostly a priori and the community formed around them

enraged_camel 6y ago

It also takes far more time and energy to craft good arguments than bad ones. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes.

_ph_ 6y ago
So much this. Drives me up the wall in somewhat scientific discussions, e.g. about climate change. A bogus statement is easily made, but disproving it, if you don't already know the answer, is really hard work - sometimes could take weeks of sincere research, if you want to use proper scientific thoroughness. And of course, there are statements which basically cannot be disproved as they are completely discoupled from reality.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Amen to that. Especially since a very popular tactic is to just bombard you with so much nonsense in rapid succession that it simply becomes impossible to discuss (and research!) each and every point. And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.
pilsetnieks 6y ago
The so-called bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
gen220 6y ago
Ideas are edifices, they have to be constructed on a foundation. And, once trusted, they becomem a platform, on top of which more ideas can be constructed. I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual). To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these. So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed. This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field. It's a real conundrum.

handedness 6y ago

Doing the right thing is one thing. At times, doing the right thing and expecting it to work out well is where it becomes naïveté. But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument. Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.

bsza 6y ago

And what makes you think that forcefully silencing such narratives will make those people change their minds? That strategy is also hopelessly naive.

lou1306 6y ago
It probably won't, but it makes it harder for such narratives to reach other people that may otherwise get radicalized.
acdha 6y ago
Nobody is being “forcibly” silenced. They’re still free to exercise their first amendment rights on their own website, in public spaces, friendly private spaces, etc. What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.
- bsza 6y ago
  Precisely. And that's what people already do when mainstream social media sites won't host their content. Meaning you can't stop misinformation from spreading, not this way. If anything, you're achieving the OPPOSITE effect by turning people who get cancelled into "martyrs". And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)
  - acdha 6y ago
    You’re missing a big key concept: Trump wasn’t on Twitter because he couldn’t afford a website. He was there because it gave him a much larger audience than would otherwise seek him out. The right-wingers who complain about the terms of service being enforced are doing so because they know they aren’t going to build anywhere near the audience without considerably more work and time.
MauranKilom 6y ago
Reducing the audience of these narratives can help with reducing their impact. I don't think this is a great solution, but not having people locked into alternate realities in the first place does not seem naive.

jessedhillon 6y ago

What's naive is thinking that anyone, once empowered to define impermissible speech, would not eventually expand that definition to include inconvenient speech. Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Federal courts are already empowered to define impermissible speech, and the worst-case scenario you describe has not happened. This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.
- jessedhillon 6y ago
  Federal courts are restrained by the defining document of this country, and by the other branches of government. This is literally the reason why all power is not vested into one branch: to restrain each other from the known corrosive effect of power. So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    They have constraints, but yes, by their judgments they define permissible speech. Consider the Larry Flynn obscenity case.
    - jessedhillon 6y ago
      And what restraints are in place on social media or app platforms when they police speech? Only the ones they place on themselves, so this analogy is broken.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that private orgs (not anyone), unconstrained from what constraints they are allowed to apply, will eventually include inconvenient speech. Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.

konjin 6y ago

When we didn't ban these people in the 00s and early 10s we didn't get people attacking the Capitol. Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup. Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position. If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.
- konjin 6y ago
  > Correlation doesn't imply causation. And it doesn't not imply it. And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I have no doubt in my mind that if the Charlottesville rally had happened in '02, Bush would not have claimed the are fine people on both sides.
    - konjin 6y ago
      So you're saying that as long as you say the right words you can be as objectively racist as you want? Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?
      - shadowgovt 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago

It also assumes a fairly-sized platform and counter-platform. Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.

arp242 6y ago

In Dutch we have a saying, which roughly translates to "a lunatic can ask more questions than ten philosophers can answer". I feel it's quite apt here too.

chj 6y ago
How can you tell a lunatic from a philosopher? Am I sounding like a lunatic now? You can refuse to answer, but why stop me from asking?
- willis936 6y ago
  No one stopped anyone from asking. This wasn’t Trump’s first offense; it was his last.
handedness 6y ago
Not weighing in on this thread, but just for those who haven't heard of the Gish gallop before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
dijit 6y ago
“The effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude more than it is to produce it.”

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago

Also most platforms make sure arguments can only even reach people who are already receptive to them. If you disagree with someone you have almost no chance of getting a message to them unless you privately message them.

colordrops 6y ago

> Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad. We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?

surbas 6y ago
“Who watches the watchmen”
JKCalhoun 6y ago
> We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. I'd like to hear some examples.
- colordrops 6y ago
  Do you really think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth? If not, which authority should be choosing which information is not ok?

anigbrowl 6y ago

Rationality is only half the issue. Not only are some people extremely irrational, many people are dishonest and knowingly feed bullshit to the irrational people to use them as an amplifier. That can be used to promulgate a false idea, or simply to steal the time of people in refuting it.

lixtra 6y ago

> Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked). How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote? > hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.

ibeckermayer 6y ago

The fact that people can be mistaken, led astray, propagandized, etc. doesn't contradict the original statement that one _should_ counter bad arguments with better arguments. In fact your argument is falling victim to the is-ought fallacy -- Things are a certain way, therefore they shouldn't be another way. The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you. It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.

brynjolf 6y ago
Sind he wasn't being censored and better arguments were presented, factual ones, how come we ended up here anyway? You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.

3131s 6y ago

So we should all defer to the superior rationality of who exactly?