7 ms·

Free expression is chaotic. It always has been and it always will be. It will always have lies and misinformation, some people will even believe the lies. But t

Free expression is chaotic. It always has been and it always will be. It will always have lies and misinformation, some people will even believe the lies. But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. Speech that is free will always seed doubt against ideas, regardless whether those ideas are true or false. It's an avenue that allows anything to be questioned. Propaganda and misinformation have been around for a long time. Mark Antony and Octavius engaged in a war of misinformation.[0] People in those times had far fewer avenues of information. If somebody sold them a false story, then people were probably more likely to believe them. We're still here though. I think what's been happening over the recent years is that people have finally started waking up from the End of History. The world is as chaotic as always. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db7791c6 https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db779...

cortesoft 6y ago
> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. This is the really tricky part, though... absolute free expression only prevents people from enacting total control if it persists; however, free speech is not something that can’t be undone. This is a form of the paradox of tolerance. If people use their absolute free speech to push lies and propaganda that allows them to gain enough control to then suppress future free speech and maintain their own power, we are no longer protected by free speech. Even if you believe truth always eventually wins out if free speech is allowed, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hit a point along that path where free speech is restricted, and our meandering path towards truth suddenly stops. Now, I don’t think restricting free speech is the answer, but we can’t pretend that it is impossible for people to use their power of free speech to prevent free speech in the future.
- anonymousDan 6y ago
  Right, lies and propaganda only have to win once.
  - heimatau 6y ago
    > only have to win once. I disagree. If you notice with American politics both sides believe in strong dogmas. There is no middle ground. They both have made their beds and they will lay in it. Corporate Dems (control the Democratic Party) and the MAGA (control the GOP) have their own ecochambers. MSNBC, CNN, etc indoctrinate the Dems. Talk radio for the GOP. The two cults will continue to clash. I wonder if the people will wake up.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I wonder if the people will wake up. The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.
      - marvin 6y ago
        Or maybe a middle that's not dominated by dogma or ideologies. There's many pieces of truth located pretty far from the center of various political ideologies, but the ideologies taken as a whole also contain a stunning amount of falsehood and simplification.
        kelnos 6y ago
        I would hope we could have both. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the policy platforms of any politicians who have claimed to be in the middle. Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.
      - DataWorker 6y ago
        Or we need to stop using words like fascism, tyranny, racist just because someone disagrees with us. That shift to cooler more informative language is just as difficult for educated people. Even on HN, so many threads devolve into Godwin’s law. I will say that one exception is education about human cognition. Trying to reason without a strong grasp of our own psychology and good ways of framing epistemological problems is like writing software without regard to hardware. Useful to some extent but prone to unforseen gotchas.
- babesh 6y ago
  That is why you need an educated populace. By educated, we mean one that can think critically and independently rather than a college credential.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method? I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education but one of them was being taught how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)
      - JamesBarney 6y ago
        Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.
        kelnos 6y ago
        I wouldn't put MDs on such a high pedestal. They're people who specialize, just like people in many other professions, and having little knowledge of statistics beyond an (oft-forgotten) undergraduate-level course wouldn't surprise me. It's a different story for doctors who go the research route rather than practicing medicine, of course.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  This is why the value of free speech needs to be protected. If enough people holds this value then it becomes difficult for anyone to change it.
heimatau 6y ago
> Free expression is chaotic. The founding fathers(FF) knew this. The FF created a system of government that acts as a society consciousness. Allowing for passion (the House) but having frontal lobe mechanisms (the Senate guards against the mob mentality). The recent insurrection happened specifically because of the laziness/apathy/intentional (take your pick, I'm certain one is true) of the Congress. It was their job to protect DC and with a rally on the same day nonetheless, yet the law enforcement was gravely lacking. Also the DC mayor and even the POTUS, yet none took the responsibility. As for Parler, they acted like little children. Whining and not doing much. They attack a hornet's nest then cry when they get stung. They should've been prepared instead of telling Tucker Carlson's audience their entire system of weaknesses. Peter Kolmisoppi, one of The Pirate Bay co-founders, criticized their behavior as well [1]. (Not being prepared, whining, etc) Society is starkly divided between the rural and urban elites. There will always be bad eggs. BLM/Qanon are equally screwed up. But the kicker is two major things. We need better discourse and more civic engagement. No change will happen without our engagement (for either side). Ultimately, I welcome the fourth turning. [1] - https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348224123592437760 https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348224123592437760
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  > The founding fathers(FF) Nitpick: why define a new acronym that you only use once? Just remove the acronym definition and change the single instance to the full word. Also, comparing BLM to QAnon is an... odd choice.
- rualca 6y ago
  > BLM/Qanon are equally screwed up. Can you please elaborate how a movement against police brutality and racism is in any way comparable with a group that supports a conspiracy theory regarding a cabal of satanic-worshiping cannibals?
  - famouslastwords 6y ago
    >Can you please elaborate how a movement against police brutality and racism is in any way comparable with a group that supports a conspiracy theory regarding a cabal of satanic-worshiping cannibals? How is a movement that rejects a conspiracy of members of the financial elite in any way comparable to a cop-killing mob that loots and burns down whole neighborhoods? You're making the mistake of assuming goodwill on the part of BLM instead of anti-White racism. Ever heard about BLM organizer Susan Rosenberg and her past as an actual communist terrorist bombing the Capitol?
imgabe 6y ago
> It will always have lies and misinformation, The misconception is that there is a form of speech that doesn't have lies or misinformation. People seem to imagine that there is some perfect form of moderation that will only present us the unvarnished truth. That simply isn't the case. You're only limiting the lies to those that serve the interest of whoever controls the moderation.
- spaginal 6y ago
  Lack of free speech necessitates an over abundance of control, misinformation, lies, and overt propaganda in order to quell any free thought that would push people to ask questions openly. That is the distinct irony of people saying we must control free speech, thought, and information, in order to prevent misinformation from compelling people to violence or what have you. It doesn’t work that way, and it’s openly promoted on this website quite fervently. The only speech that brings people back to the middle, away from the extremes, is free speech and open debate. That is it.
  - robin21 6y ago
    I think free speech is a very difficult pill to swallow when it's not convenient for your own agenda. As soon as one side makes an exception then the other side can, all the way to full censorship of each other's opposing sides. This is fascinating to observe in political chat rooms and message boards where anyone submitting a dissenting opinion is called a spy or troll and will be banned until there are no dissenters left.
    - spaginal 6y ago
      It is a difficult pill to swallow because convincing someone they are going down the wrong path where free speech reigns requires nuance, knowledge of subject, listening, empathy, and tact. All things people are too lazy to do now, especially politicians, teachers, media, and media gatekeepers, who are the worst offenders of this, and simply wish to drive eyeballs, create a monopoly for their crappy ideas, and rile up their bases. Simply banning something never actually makes it go away, especially ideas. It’s easier to declare them as an enemy of the state, communists, nazi’s, right wing, left wing, formenting insurrection, compelling violence, or whatever other set of buzzwords that sound dangerous enough and catchy. Then you feel morally justified in silencing them, although you really haven’t silenced them, now they simply go into the dark recesses of society and simmer for years or decades, sometimes a generation or two, until it spills out in actually violent and chaotic ways. I just wish people would actually sit down and talk again in real life. I wish online forums would stop driving engagement with votes and likes, and would stop downvoting and silencing for actual opinion or thought and drove real healthy engagement that cut this sort of behavior off at the knees. I feel like a dinosaur at this point watching the comet come in.
rodgerd 6y ago
> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator. It's just as well that's never happened!
- jimz 6y ago
  And now he's out. The system's not about preemptively stopping theoretical bad acts per se (although if it actually stops real incoming threats, great), but rather, about being able to evaluate and change course when human fallibility inevitably leads to bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. It's a work in progress, particularly as to how we can properly disincentivize future attempts and hold those who actively attempted to overthrow the Constitutional state by force without resorting to Minority-Report style overbroad invasions of privacy, but at least we can do that. These things are such non-starters in China and Russia that the former more or less acquiesced to a corrupt state and the latter has an economy that was so thoroughly disposessed by the few from the people that its GDP is on par with New York City despite 60 times the population, and with no recourse. Change is never easy nor always correct, but at least that opportunity exists here. It doesn't in many places that purportedly have "order" over "liberty" as the central value, as they end up with neither.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    You don't think USA achieved that by being the best ones? See for example history of relationships with Cuba, the same goes for pretty much everything, not only Cuba.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    >> Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator. > And now he's out. Trump was never a dictator. > bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. Got any examples?
rualca 6y ago
> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. This ignores all the historical events where groups leveraging said chaotic nature of free speech succeeded in establishing totalitarian regimes which enacted total control over the entire population, including it's supporters.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Well, actually ... one of the best lessons from the interwar period is that political parties must be forbidden from keeping their paramilitary units. Because at the moment of the coup, well-organized paramilitary units (SA or Czechoslovak People Militias or Italian Camicie Nere) were always the crucial factor in success, and not just a mob of random rabble aroused by someone's speech. All the later hotspots on the European map (North Ireland, Basque Country, Corsica) broke this rule and the local irredentist parties had a "political wing" and a "militant wing".
dkobia 6y ago
We're also waking up to the fact that free speech is an incredibly difficult ideal to uphold. Hate speech, fake speech, etc are testing the limits. Other ideals like religion are much easier to uphold in a mostly secular society until a new religion threatens the place of a dying incumbent. Really all these ideals are great when we're on the same page, until we aren't.
Bakary 6y ago
The only people who still believed in the End of History in these past few years were the elites and the well-to-do knowledge workers that serve them

cortesoft 6y ago

> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. This is the really tricky part, though... absolute free expression only prevents people from enacting total control if it persists; however, free speech is not something that can’t be undone. This is a form of the paradox of tolerance. If people use their absolute free speech to push lies and propaganda that allows them to gain enough control to then suppress future free speech and maintain their own power, we are no longer protected by free speech. Even if you believe truth always eventually wins out if free speech is allowed, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hit a point along that path where free speech is restricted, and our meandering path towards truth suddenly stops. Now, I don’t think restricting free speech is the answer, but we can’t pretend that it is impossible for people to use their power of free speech to prevent free speech in the future.

anonymousDan 6y ago
Right, lies and propaganda only have to win once.
- heimatau 6y ago
  > only have to win once. I disagree. If you notice with American politics both sides believe in strong dogmas. There is no middle ground. They both have made their beds and they will lay in it. Corporate Dems (control the Democratic Party) and the MAGA (control the GOP) have their own ecochambers. MSNBC, CNN, etc indoctrinate the Dems. Talk radio for the GOP. The two cults will continue to clash. I wonder if the people will wake up.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I wonder if the people will wake up. The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.
    - marvin 6y ago
      Or maybe a middle that's not dominated by dogma or ideologies. There's many pieces of truth located pretty far from the center of various political ideologies, but the ideologies taken as a whole also contain a stunning amount of falsehood and simplification.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        I would hope we could have both. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the policy platforms of any politicians who have claimed to be in the middle. Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.
    - DataWorker 6y ago
      Or we need to stop using words like fascism, tyranny, racist just because someone disagrees with us. That shift to cooler more informative language is just as difficult for educated people. Even on HN, so many threads devolve into Godwin’s law. I will say that one exception is education about human cognition. Trying to reason without a strong grasp of our own psychology and good ways of framing epistemological problems is like writing software without regard to hardware. Useful to some extent but prone to unforseen gotchas.
babesh 6y ago
That is why you need an educated populace. By educated, we mean one that can think critically and independently rather than a college credential.
- rayiner 6y ago
  We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method? I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education but one of them was being taught how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)
    - JamesBarney 6y ago
      Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        I wouldn't put MDs on such a high pedestal. They're people who specialize, just like people in many other professions, and having little knowledge of statistics beyond an (oft-forgotten) undergraduate-level course wouldn't surprise me. It's a different story for doctors who go the research route rather than practicing medicine, of course.
Aerroon 6y ago
This is why the value of free speech needs to be protected. If enough people holds this value then it becomes difficult for anyone to change it.

heimatau 6y ago

> Free expression is chaotic. The founding fathers(FF) knew this. The FF created a system of government that acts as a society consciousness. Allowing for passion (the House) but having frontal lobe mechanisms (the Senate guards against the mob mentality). The recent insurrection happened specifically because of the laziness/apathy/intentional (take your pick, I'm certain one is true) of the Congress. It was their job to protect DC and with a rally on the same day nonetheless, yet the law enforcement was gravely lacking. Also the DC mayor and even the POTUS, yet none took the responsibility. As for Parler, they acted like little children. Whining and not doing much. They attack a hornet's nest then cry when they get stung. They should've been prepared instead of telling Tucker Carlson's audience their entire system of weaknesses. Peter Kolmisoppi, one of The Pirate Bay co-founders, criticized their behavior as well [1]. (Not being prepared, whining, etc) Society is starkly divided between the rural and urban elites. There will always be bad eggs. BLM/Qanon are equally screwed up. But the kicker is two major things. We need better discourse and more civic engagement. No change will happen without our engagement (for either side). Ultimately, I welcome the fourth turning. [1] - https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348224123592437760 https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348224123592437760

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
> The founding fathers(FF) Nitpick: why define a new acronym that you only use once? Just remove the acronym definition and change the single instance to the full word. Also, comparing BLM to QAnon is an... odd choice.
rualca 6y ago
> BLM/Qanon are equally screwed up. Can you please elaborate how a movement against police brutality and racism is in any way comparable with a group that supports a conspiracy theory regarding a cabal of satanic-worshiping cannibals?
- famouslastwords 6y ago
  >Can you please elaborate how a movement against police brutality and racism is in any way comparable with a group that supports a conspiracy theory regarding a cabal of satanic-worshiping cannibals? How is a movement that rejects a conspiracy of members of the financial elite in any way comparable to a cop-killing mob that loots and burns down whole neighborhoods? You're making the mistake of assuming goodwill on the part of BLM instead of anti-White racism. Ever heard about BLM organizer Susan Rosenberg and her past as an actual communist terrorist bombing the Capitol?

imgabe 6y ago

> It will always have lies and misinformation, The misconception is that there is a form of speech that doesn't have lies or misinformation. People seem to imagine that there is some perfect form of moderation that will only present us the unvarnished truth. That simply isn't the case. You're only limiting the lies to those that serve the interest of whoever controls the moderation.

spaginal 6y ago
Lack of free speech necessitates an over abundance of control, misinformation, lies, and overt propaganda in order to quell any free thought that would push people to ask questions openly. That is the distinct irony of people saying we must control free speech, thought, and information, in order to prevent misinformation from compelling people to violence or what have you. It doesn’t work that way, and it’s openly promoted on this website quite fervently. The only speech that brings people back to the middle, away from the extremes, is free speech and open debate. That is it.
- robin21 6y ago
  I think free speech is a very difficult pill to swallow when it's not convenient for your own agenda. As soon as one side makes an exception then the other side can, all the way to full censorship of each other's opposing sides. This is fascinating to observe in political chat rooms and message boards where anyone submitting a dissenting opinion is called a spy or troll and will be banned until there are no dissenters left.
  - spaginal 6y ago
    It is a difficult pill to swallow because convincing someone they are going down the wrong path where free speech reigns requires nuance, knowledge of subject, listening, empathy, and tact. All things people are too lazy to do now, especially politicians, teachers, media, and media gatekeepers, who are the worst offenders of this, and simply wish to drive eyeballs, create a monopoly for their crappy ideas, and rile up their bases. Simply banning something never actually makes it go away, especially ideas. It’s easier to declare them as an enemy of the state, communists, nazi’s, right wing, left wing, formenting insurrection, compelling violence, or whatever other set of buzzwords that sound dangerous enough and catchy. Then you feel morally justified in silencing them, although you really haven’t silenced them, now they simply go into the dark recesses of society and simmer for years or decades, sometimes a generation or two, until it spills out in actually violent and chaotic ways. I just wish people would actually sit down and talk again in real life. I wish online forums would stop driving engagement with votes and likes, and would stop downvoting and silencing for actual opinion or thought and drove real healthy engagement that cut this sort of behavior off at the knees. I feel like a dinosaur at this point watching the comet come in.

rodgerd 6y ago

> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator. It's just as well that's never happened!

jimz 6y ago
And now he's out. The system's not about preemptively stopping theoretical bad acts per se (although if it actually stops real incoming threats, great), but rather, about being able to evaluate and change course when human fallibility inevitably leads to bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. It's a work in progress, particularly as to how we can properly disincentivize future attempts and hold those who actively attempted to overthrow the Constitutional state by force without resorting to Minority-Report style overbroad invasions of privacy, but at least we can do that. These things are such non-starters in China and Russia that the former more or less acquiesced to a corrupt state and the latter has an economy that was so thoroughly disposessed by the few from the people that its GDP is on par with New York City despite 60 times the population, and with no recourse. Change is never easy nor always correct, but at least that opportunity exists here. It doesn't in many places that purportedly have "order" over "liberty" as the central value, as they end up with neither.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  You don't think USA achieved that by being the best ones? See for example history of relationships with Cuba, the same goes for pretty much everything, not only Cuba.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  >> Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator. > And now he's out. Trump was never a dictator. > bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. Got any examples?

rualca 6y ago

> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control. This ignores all the historical events where groups leveraging said chaotic nature of free speech succeeded in establishing totalitarian regimes which enacted total control over the entire population, including it's supporters.

inglor_cz 6y ago
Well, actually ... one of the best lessons from the interwar period is that political parties must be forbidden from keeping their paramilitary units. Because at the moment of the coup, well-organized paramilitary units (SA or Czechoslovak People Militias or Italian Camicie Nere) were always the crucial factor in success, and not just a mob of random rabble aroused by someone's speech. All the later hotspots on the European map (North Ireland, Basque Country, Corsica) broke this rule and the local irredentist parties had a "political wing" and a "militant wing".

dkobia 6y ago

We're also waking up to the fact that free speech is an incredibly difficult ideal to uphold. Hate speech, fake speech, etc are testing the limits. Other ideals like religion are much easier to uphold in a mostly secular society until a new religion threatens the place of a dying incumbent. Really all these ideals are great when we're on the same page, until we aren't.

Bakary 6y ago

The only people who still believed in the End of History in these past few years were the elites and the well-to-do knowledge workers that serve them