4 ms·

The answer to dangerous lies is the truth, not censorship. We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Unfortunately, I see a tren

The answer to dangerous lies is the truth, not censorship. We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Unfortunately, I see a trend towards restricting free speech, which will only harm the country in the long term.

thejellypen 6y ago
bad ideas may eventually die by they may also cause harm before dying out.
rootusrootus 6y ago
> We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread That is the ideal. The actual marketplace seems to operate in the opposite fashion.
ardy42 6y ago
> We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. If that were true, neither QAnon nor "Stop the Steal" would have gone anywhere. Instead, they spread like wildfire to the point where their adherents literally attacked the democratic process. The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement, and it's becoming increasingly clear that is not actually the case.
- zug_zug 6y ago
  Yes, and we can simplify even more -- we have a case from 80 years ago where the greatest atrocity in history was committed by a population that got duped by an anti-semitic demagogue. To all those bandying about "free speech" without ever tackling any of the nuances of reality, I'd love to hear -- if push came to shove, would you have argued platforms should be giving megaphones to even Hitler? If not, you acknowledge there's a line, so let's define it.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    The Weimer Republic had extensive hate speech laws on the books, which they even used to prosecute the Nazis in several cases. Not only were those laws ineffective, but the Nazis coopted them to silence opposition. In contrast the US and the UK, with their free speech absolutism (British hate speech laws weren't put into place until recently), were one of the few major democracies without fascist parties winning any major elections.
    - zug_zug 6y ago
      This doesn't really pass the smell test. I know very little about Hitler, but the small amount I do know is Hitler was found guilty of treason and put in jail for 5 years, during which he wrote Mein Kampf [1]. It seems pretty obvious to me if he had been put to death (the ultimate form of censorship) the holocaust wouldn't have happened. You also dodge the central question - Do you believe Hitler had a protected right to free speech worth defending? I may or may not read your response because I don't believe you're arguing in good faith though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
    - pashamur 6y ago
      There is a good section on this in the book How Democracies Die where they go into detail as to why fascists could not come to power in America before Donald Trump. Basically their argument was that the party structures performed gatekeeping functions and that populists could not even get nominated to a party ticket (even with massive popular support, comparable to that of Donald Trump - they give the example of Henry Ford). Those gatekeeping functions were lessened after the violent Democratic national convention of '68 (where there was a clash between pro-war and anti-war factions) and primaries became a thing that actually mattered (in 68 Humphrey was selected by backroom insiders who did not participate in a single primary in that cycle, leading to public outcry). However, the gatekeeping effects persisted because of the control the parties still had over advertising channels and the media; that control fell apart post-2000, which setup the conditions that enabled a populist like Donald Trump to actually be elected to the presidency. So it's not free speech that kept fascists out of power in the U.S., it's institutional gatekeeping (in the 30's and 40's).
- thursday0987 6y ago
  the marketplace of ideas actually only works when people take the time to look past the branding of something, or the headline, and actually get into the meat and potatoes of the idea itself. to use your example, both QAnon and "Stop the Steal" had enough evidence that they were able to convince large swaths of people. dismissing the people who see that evidence as not "rational actors with good judgement" just conflates the problem. if anything, you assuming that 80+ million people (including several state governments) are incapable of looking at evidece and making up their own minds just because you came to a different conclusion is more of a problem than QAnon and "Stop the Steal" themselves.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement You're leaving out the implicit assumption you're making, that the "authorities" in charge of the marketplace are rational actors. You better hope to hell, that they are. Because when some marketplace participants fail, they fail gracefully. When centralized authorities fail, they fail spectacularly and disastrously. I can virtually guarantee you that Qanon will be a footnote in ten years time. In contrast how would you like to live in Iran, China, Turkey, or any other regime where lunatics have taken over in the name of "protecting the people from dangerous ideas"? All those people clamoring for authorities to clamp down on irrational Trumpist extremists, have forgotten that Trump and his cronies were just recently in charge of all three branches of the government as well as a supermajority of state governments. This is how the political cycle always goes. All anybody sees is a sensible, incoming administration with likeminded views. And I actually agree. Biden's a decent man, and I honestly can't see him abusing even very broad powers. But what happens after? But there's no putting this genie back in the bottle. Do you trust President Donald Trump Jr. or President Tucker Carlson or President Josh Hawley with that power? This isn't even hypothetical. Most people here are too young to remember the post-9/11 hysteria. But I can virtually guarantee you that had the current crop of anti-speech activists managed to put their would-be "anti-extremist" laws in place, that opposition to the War on Terror would have been de facto illegal. Dealing with some stupid conspiracy theories and LARPer shamans, who have as much chance of overthrowing the American government as my toddler, are a small price to pay for fault-tolerance in liberal democracy.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    I don't see that assumption anywhere in the parent comment. Nor any call for authorities of some unknown nature to clamp down. Just the point that the "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function very well when those in it are not acting in good faith. Qanon may be a footnote in ten years. The Tea Party is a footnote from the last decade. The Klan has gone down to footnote several times and been revived each time. (Although the current incarnation has gotten rid of the name and the outfits. Yay, progress!) I remember the 9/11 hysteria, and I remember checking on my Moslem friends about the free speech they were receiving. Anyway, and yet, here we are. Blind faith in the marketplace of ideas doesn't work any better than blind faith in the invisible hand of economics.
- triceratops 6y ago
  These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed. I love free speech. I think it's one of the most important things in society. But the whole "kill lies with more speech" meme needs to die because there's simply no evidence for it. We should have free speech for its own sake, and recognize and mitigate its harmful effects as much as possible. If we don't, society will turn against free speech entirely and everyone will be much worse off.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed. I couldn't agree more. They also seem to have pretty extreme tunnel vision, and even seem to discard other First Amendment rights, like freedom of association and freedom of the press. Freedom of speech also means freedom to not speak, likewise freedom of association means freedom to not associate and freedom of the press means freedom not to publish. These are rights that aren't always in harmony, and need to be balanced if they're all to mean anything at all. I think some of the zealotry is caused by something like "knowing just enough to be dangerous." It's easy to fall into zealotry if you only really know oversimple versions of one or two things. However, I think at least some of it is bad-faith argumentation, where grand invocations of "freedom of speech" are just rhetorical cover for shitty opinions they'd like to spread unhindered.
genericuser314 6y ago
"We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread." Perhaps it should work that way, but in a US context, I think this is demonstrably false. Many people participating in the marketplace of ideas hold diametrically opposing ideas and posit contradictory facts. There is no winnowing of falsehood from truth.
wiredfool 6y ago
Your fundamental assumption is that bad ideas die. I'm not sure that is supported by the evidence. The converse of that is "If the idea persists, it's good". I'm having a hard time seeing the evidence for that as well.
- mcguire 6y ago
  Maybe something akin to Gresham's law?
- username90 6y ago
  Bad ideas die but it takes decades.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    They also tend to be resurrected once outside the immediate lifespan of people who lived through them. For example, "trickle-down economics" was once called "horse and sparrow theory" back when the idea was popular in the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics (where did "trickle down" come from anyway? Well, if you feed the horse enough oats, there will be some left for the sparrows. That's what's "trickling down".)
  - wiredfool 6y ago
    Years to Centuries. Some die, some live on. Some come around again, like the unwelcome undead.
aaomidi 6y ago
> where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Why do we assume this is true? Billions of people get scammed in the world yearly. Yes. Billions. Mass hysteria[1] is a thing, and sure in the long term an idea __may__ die out (again, there's no real evidence of this). The damage done until it does die out can lead to a rise in cult of personality like how Hitler came into power and became so popular in Germany. There isn't some natural filter of hate and __bad__ ideas in humans. People are sheep and will put their weight behind anyone who resonates with them. Not necessarily "good" ideas. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases
tomku 6y ago
The thing that makes ideas spread is not good/bad or truth/lie, it's whether people find them useful or comforting to believe. The truth has no chance in the "marketplace of ideas" against comforting lies that reinforce people's feelings of superiority and infallibility.
anigbrowl 6y ago
We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed. It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy. Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.
yifanl 6y ago
In a world where we cannot censor an idea, then there is _no_ difference between a good and a bad idea, the very act of making a value judgment if an idea is good or bad is inherently an act of censorship. Given that, there's clearly an amount of acceptable censorship that is higher than 0.

thejellypen 6y ago

bad ideas may eventually die by they may also cause harm before dying out.

rootusrootus 6y ago

> We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread That is the ideal. The actual marketplace seems to operate in the opposite fashion.

ardy42 6y ago

> We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. If that were true, neither QAnon nor "Stop the Steal" would have gone anywhere. Instead, they spread like wildfire to the point where their adherents literally attacked the democratic process. The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement, and it's becoming increasingly clear that is not actually the case.

zug_zug 6y ago
Yes, and we can simplify even more -- we have a case from 80 years ago where the greatest atrocity in history was committed by a population that got duped by an anti-semitic demagogue. To all those bandying about "free speech" without ever tackling any of the nuances of reality, I'd love to hear -- if push came to shove, would you have argued platforms should be giving megaphones to even Hitler? If not, you acknowledge there's a line, so let's define it.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  The Weimer Republic had extensive hate speech laws on the books, which they even used to prosecute the Nazis in several cases. Not only were those laws ineffective, but the Nazis coopted them to silence opposition. In contrast the US and the UK, with their free speech absolutism (British hate speech laws weren't put into place until recently), were one of the few major democracies without fascist parties winning any major elections.
  - zug_zug 6y ago
    This doesn't really pass the smell test. I know very little about Hitler, but the small amount I do know is Hitler was found guilty of treason and put in jail for 5 years, during which he wrote Mein Kampf [1]. It seems pretty obvious to me if he had been put to death (the ultimate form of censorship) the holocaust wouldn't have happened. You also dodge the central question - Do you believe Hitler had a protected right to free speech worth defending? I may or may not read your response because I don't believe you're arguing in good faith though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
  - pashamur 6y ago
    There is a good section on this in the book How Democracies Die where they go into detail as to why fascists could not come to power in America before Donald Trump. Basically their argument was that the party structures performed gatekeeping functions and that populists could not even get nominated to a party ticket (even with massive popular support, comparable to that of Donald Trump - they give the example of Henry Ford). Those gatekeeping functions were lessened after the violent Democratic national convention of '68 (where there was a clash between pro-war and anti-war factions) and primaries became a thing that actually mattered (in 68 Humphrey was selected by backroom insiders who did not participate in a single primary in that cycle, leading to public outcry). However, the gatekeeping effects persisted because of the control the parties still had over advertising channels and the media; that control fell apart post-2000, which setup the conditions that enabled a populist like Donald Trump to actually be elected to the presidency. So it's not free speech that kept fascists out of power in the U.S., it's institutional gatekeeping (in the 30's and 40's).
thursday0987 6y ago
the marketplace of ideas actually only works when people take the time to look past the branding of something, or the headline, and actually get into the meat and potatoes of the idea itself. to use your example, both QAnon and "Stop the Steal" had enough evidence that they were able to convince large swaths of people. dismissing the people who see that evidence as not "rational actors with good judgement" just conflates the problem. if anything, you assuming that 80+ million people (including several state governments) are incapable of looking at evidece and making up their own minds just because you came to a different conclusion is more of a problem than QAnon and "Stop the Steal" themselves.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement You're leaving out the implicit assumption you're making, that the "authorities" in charge of the marketplace are rational actors. You better hope to hell, that they are. Because when some marketplace participants fail, they fail gracefully. When centralized authorities fail, they fail spectacularly and disastrously. I can virtually guarantee you that Qanon will be a footnote in ten years time. In contrast how would you like to live in Iran, China, Turkey, or any other regime where lunatics have taken over in the name of "protecting the people from dangerous ideas"? All those people clamoring for authorities to clamp down on irrational Trumpist extremists, have forgotten that Trump and his cronies were just recently in charge of all three branches of the government as well as a supermajority of state governments. This is how the political cycle always goes. All anybody sees is a sensible, incoming administration with likeminded views. And I actually agree. Biden's a decent man, and I honestly can't see him abusing even very broad powers. But what happens after? But there's no putting this genie back in the bottle. Do you trust President Donald Trump Jr. or President Tucker Carlson or President Josh Hawley with that power? This isn't even hypothetical. Most people here are too young to remember the post-9/11 hysteria. But I can virtually guarantee you that had the current crop of anti-speech activists managed to put their would-be "anti-extremist" laws in place, that opposition to the War on Terror would have been de facto illegal. Dealing with some stupid conspiracy theories and LARPer shamans, who have as much chance of overthrowing the American government as my toddler, are a small price to pay for fault-tolerance in liberal democracy.
- mcguire 6y ago
  I don't see that assumption anywhere in the parent comment. Nor any call for authorities of some unknown nature to clamp down. Just the point that the "marketplace of ideas" doesn't function very well when those in it are not acting in good faith. Qanon may be a footnote in ten years. The Tea Party is a footnote from the last decade. The Klan has gone down to footnote several times and been revived each time. (Although the current incarnation has gotten rid of the name and the outfits. Yay, progress!) I remember the 9/11 hysteria, and I remember checking on my Moslem friends about the free speech they were receiving. Anyway, and yet, here we are. Blind faith in the marketplace of ideas doesn't work any better than blind faith in the invisible hand of economics.
triceratops 6y ago
These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed. I love free speech. I think it's one of the most important things in society. But the whole "kill lies with more speech" meme needs to die because there's simply no evidence for it. We should have free speech for its own sake, and recognize and mitigate its harmful effects as much as possible. If we don't, society will turn against free speech entirely and everyone will be much worse off.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > These "marketplace of ideas" zealots don't operate on evidence. No exceptions or qualifications to the sanctity of free speech exist. Free speech is a faith, and no such heresies are allowed. I couldn't agree more. They also seem to have pretty extreme tunnel vision, and even seem to discard other First Amendment rights, like freedom of association and freedom of the press. Freedom of speech also means freedom to not speak, likewise freedom of association means freedom to not associate and freedom of the press means freedom not to publish. These are rights that aren't always in harmony, and need to be balanced if they're all to mean anything at all. I think some of the zealotry is caused by something like "knowing just enough to be dangerous." It's easy to fall into zealotry if you only really know oversimple versions of one or two things. However, I think at least some of it is bad-faith argumentation, where grand invocations of "freedom of speech" are just rhetorical cover for shitty opinions they'd like to spread unhindered.

genericuser314 6y ago

"We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread." Perhaps it should work that way, but in a US context, I think this is demonstrably false. Many people participating in the marketplace of ideas hold diametrically opposing ideas and posit contradictory facts. There is no winnowing of falsehood from truth.

wiredfool 6y ago

Your fundamental assumption is that bad ideas die. I'm not sure that is supported by the evidence. The converse of that is "If the idea persists, it's good". I'm having a hard time seeing the evidence for that as well.

mcguire 6y ago
Maybe something akin to Gresham's law?
username90 6y ago
Bad ideas die but it takes decades.
- paulmd 6y ago
  They also tend to be resurrected once outside the immediate lifespan of people who lived through them. For example, "trickle-down economics" was once called "horse and sparrow theory" back when the idea was popular in the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics (where did "trickle down" come from anyway? Well, if you feed the horse enough oats, there will be some left for the sparrows. That's what's "trickling down".)
- wiredfool 6y ago
  Years to Centuries. Some die, some live on. Some come around again, like the unwelcome undead.

aaomidi 6y ago

> where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Why do we assume this is true? Billions of people get scammed in the world yearly. Yes. Billions. Mass hysteria[1] is a thing, and sure in the long term an idea __may__ die out (again, there's no real evidence of this). The damage done until it does die out can lead to a rise in cult of personality like how Hitler came into power and became so popular in Germany. There isn't some natural filter of hate and __bad__ ideas in humans. People are sheep and will put their weight behind anyone who resonates with them. Not necessarily "good" ideas. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

tomku 6y ago

The thing that makes ideas spread is not good/bad or truth/lie, it's whether people find them useful or comforting to believe. The truth has no chance in the "marketplace of ideas" against comforting lies that reinforce people's feelings of superiority and infallibility.

anigbrowl 6y ago

We have a marketplace of ideas where bad ideas die and good ideas spread. Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed. It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy. Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.

yifanl 6y ago

In a world where we cannot censor an idea, then there is _no_ difference between a good and a bad idea, the very act of making a value judgment if an idea is good or bad is inherently an act of censorship. Given that, there's clearly an amount of acceptable censorship that is higher than 0.