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>First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform level The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in r

by Nursie 5y ago

>First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform level The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO. Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive. Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

pankajdoharey 5y ago
Its less a "Marketplace of Ideas" and more a "church or private establishment" on the network. Even HN isnt spot on sometime bad ideas do rise up when they it appeals to peoples emotions more than sensibilities.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Social media (and the internet as a whole) are shaped by and promote the values of those who create it. They allow certain interactions and not others. (to what extent are the creators the leaders of the social media companies, vs. the users?) https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/519/440 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...
throwawayboise 5y ago
> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created I don't think this is unique to the online world. It's just how humans are. We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.
- Nursie 5y ago
  > We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe. While I agree, I think there's more to it than that, I think it's more serious than that, and I think the message amplification capabilities afforded to profit-driven (or ideologically driven) bad actors is something we've not really seen before. Certainly not at this scale. So while it is human nature, that's not to say the outcomes are desirable, nor that the marketplace of ideas concept is consistent with reality. In fact I think it might be the point, much like the perfect economic market, the concept of the well-functioning marketplace of ideas cannot exist, because of the humans that make it up.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    "major platforms’ amplification features have also caused or contributed to real damage in the world. At a societal level, they have spread misleading political material, to the detriment of democratic governance" https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-discontents https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-dis...
    - Clubber 5y ago
      The Catholic Church felt the same way about Gutenberg's press.
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Gutenberg's first mass-produced book was a Latin Vulgate bible. The 40 remaining copies are among the most valuable books in the world. Gutenberg also printed indulgences for the church. It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07090a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07090a.htm
        Clubber 5y ago
        >It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg. I wasn't talking about the man, I was talking about the machine. The Catholic Church certainly didn't love it anymore once The Reformation happened. See the Catholic Church could no longer control information when lay people could read the Bible, and Martin Luther's texts. Gutenberg's press completely transformed the church's control in Europe and it lasts to this day. https://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/reformation/role-of-printing https://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/exhibit... This has parallels today. The government can no longer control information via traditional media channels because the internet, in its current form, exists. They want that control back. I believe this is an attempt to regain control. The government would never shut down big tech companies, they are a great source of information for data collection.
spamizbad 5y ago
That's because the "marketplace of ideas" is being distorted by algorithms that are going to favor "provocative" ideas that drive clicks. Exciting lies defeat boring truths.
- Nursie 5y ago
  That may well be a big factor, and that's something that needs to be looked at more closely. Lots of people describe being drawn down the rabbithole by algorithmically driven suggestions which nudge them ever more extreme.
  - suzzer99 5y ago
    I have thought this for a while. Algorithms are something entirely new to human discourse. Apparently I watched some alt-right-adjacent podcast or something, so for weeks youtube kept recommending seriously racist, fascist, white nationalist content. The algorithm was actively trying to lead me down the rabbit hole. Obviously it's learned that doing so increases engagement.
- justbored123 5y ago
  That tells you that "marketplace of ideas" is a dumb idea, because we already have proved a million times that people are not the rational creatures that we were sold we were for a long time. We are smart apes, but apes none the least: emotionally driven by our limbic system, very tribal and status seeking. Prone to rationalize all these basic impulses in a million different ways creating the illusion of rational individualism. The algorithms just shows us our true nature, don't make the mistake of shooting the messenger.
  - readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    If the algorithm distorts conversation, then how can you be sure it more accurately reflects human nature? How does something that isn't a marketplace of ideas prove it's dumb? Or should this question be punished by your algorithm?
deleted 5y ago
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AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas There are indeed some factual mistakes floating around, mostly around covid-is-just-a-flu and the-earth-is-flat discussions. But usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such. Alas, there's no hard science in most of these issues. There is a bunch of plausible-looking speculations, philosophical theses and general thoughts. Pretty much like 17-th century physics, in 18-th century biology or 19-th century medicine were. As for the ideas being harmful... What do we do with potentially harmful, yet factually correct statements, and does the same logic apply to beneficial, but factually wrong ones?
- Nursie 5y ago
  I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one. But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit. > usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such. flat earth is .... well I wouldn't put it with the most harmful ideas. It's clearly very silly, and not a great thing to propagate, but so far flat earthers haven't taken their beliefs out on the road, so to speak. Antivax, now that's harmful. There are certainly all sorts of grey areas and I wouldn't want to suppress discussion of safety, of risks from emergency approval or whatever, but when you get to "The vaccine makes you infertile" and "The vaccine will kill everyone that gets it" and "The vaccine contains 5G chips that they are going to use to track you", and such views actually start to impact the uptake...
  - peytn 5y ago
    > and such views actually start to impact the uptake I’m not sure that’s how the chain of causality works. We have 80s-style public health communication that isn’t effective today. People are looking for a reason to reject it. If not the 5G chip stuff, it’d be something else.
    - 5y ago
ideata20592510 5y ago
Missing from this discussion is the understanding that speech is an inalienable right. It does not need to be justified on consequentialist grounds, nor on the basis of the more pernicious metric of harm reduction. Pointing a gun at someone to silence her is a form of censorship, and so is quietly erasing her from the most prevalent communications channels (deplatforming). Figure out a way to achieve harm reduction without grotesque violations of natural rights. Until then, there will always be people who prefer dangerous speech to the safety of slavery.
TheFalun 5y ago
“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” -- John Stuart Mill couldn't disagree more.
- Nursie 5y ago
  It is this attitude which appears to be based on an idealistic assumption that people care about exchanging error for truth. This is what I am arguing is not really the case, as demonstrated amply by the world around us.
- seizethegdgap 5y ago
  You're using the quote of someone who lived and died before the invention of the telephone, and also ignoring that he also advocated for a 'harm principle' (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle) which states "...that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection."
  - TheFalun 5y ago
    So you think we should completely ignore anyone who has said anything of substance before any arbitrary technology was invented or if they have any other opinion that you disagree with? We can safely cast theses people's opinions out as invalid? Is that not exactly what you are implying? Do you not see how absurd those implicit arguments are? That's not to mention the fact that you are ignoring the amount of influence that man had on our political and economic systems which benefit your life in ways you probably haven't considered...
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Often at the root of these is a profit motive." Big Tech is DOA if the web is not open for commercial use, i.e., advertising. But the web is definitely not DOA if all advertising ceased. Look at the enormous growth of the internet, the vast number of users with internet subscriptions today, billions of them using the network on a daily basis for a variety of non-commerial uses, hundreds of millions uploading content for others to consume. (Big Tech middlemen pervert this recreational usage for their own commercial uses.) The internet was not created for the purposes of advertising. (There was none in the beginning.) That is only one use. Look what happens when we allow ads without any rules. Yikes. Even if advertising were regulated, the web could still be used for commerce, e.g., processing commercial transactions.
sneak 5y ago
> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. This is plausible, so people believe it. Fortunately, it is false. Compare the state of the world regarding germ theory, human rights, smoking, racism, education, the belief in violence to solve problems, or the delusion that is theism to the world 100 years ago. It used to be way, way worse. The better ideas are winning. Things are improving tremendously. It just takes time.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Those are all pre-internet. Not sure they are good examples of how the marketplace works in social media.
- cdirkx 5y ago
  But are those ideas winning because people are rationally chosing to believe in them in the marketplace of ideas, or just that we grew up with them and the people with contrary beliefs are dying out. There is a saying that "science advances one funeral at a time" because even professors etc., one of the most rational group of people on the planet I would think, have biases against new theories despite evidence supporting them, instead sticking to what they already know even if it would be disproven.
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PicassoCTs 5y ago
The internet has been a beautiful experiment to find out how what crank ideology aligns best to the human default instinctive nature.
wyager 5y ago
> I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. The fact that you phrase your characterization of incorrect ideas like this suggests with pretty high certainty that you don’t exactly have a great birds’-eye view of the epistemic landscape yourself. People who characterize the “opposition” this way mostly get their ideas from NPR-tier Pravda publications, and aren’t exactly better suited for picking out “better models of truth and reality”.
- archagon 5y ago
  The fact that you equivocate NPR and Pravda means you’ve huffed plenty of those fumes yourself.
  - wyager 5y ago
    > Voting Republican is to enact fascism and tear down the tenants of democracy in the US You seem like a skilled political analyst, so I defer to your expertise. One correction - it’s spelled “tenets”.
- Nursie 5y ago
  I don’t characterise “the opposition” this way. I characterise some of the more prominent ‘fringe’ stuff as this. I don’t really have an ‘us’ for there to be a singular ‘them’ I’m talking about, I’m not American and I don’t identify with any particular political party.
deleted 5y ago
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amelius 5y ago
> We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. It's the same with the economy. Not the best products win, but the ones with the biggest advertising budget. We should try to dampen the effect of these counterproductive forces.
version_five 5y ago
It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc). The strawman of the existence of factually incorrect content is irrelevant in my view. Everyone loves to jump on conspiracy theories or whatever other stuff is out there as proof that people (other people) are too dumb to be exposed to the world. First, I think the relevance and the number of serious adherents in the extreme version of these conspiracies etc are dramatically overstated because they reinforce a narrative. Second, I think most of it is an effect, not a cause, of people being told what to do and what to think. People uncomfortable with narratives that end in them giving something up will take shelter in alternative explanations. The problem is not the nutty theories being available, it's in the way that one group forces itself on another in the first place. All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.
- Nursie 5y ago
  > The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary. > we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue. But no, of course, you're right, taking any action at all is akin to fascism. Totally.
pessimizer 5y ago
It's not good to both observe that crank ideas rise to the top due to the profit motive, and to think the solution could be that the people who are best at profit should get to censor speech. Maybe we attack should sleazy commerce rather than speech? The reason people go in for crank ideas is because they recognize that the people who sell them things are constantly manipulating them. They work so they don't have time to investigate everything themselves, so as a proxy many tend to believe marginal people who they don't know at all due to the signal that their speech is being suppressed by known liars who are never called out because of their power. Meanwhile, the upper middle-class people who provide the infrastructure and strategy for the biggest frauds are smug in the belief that their betters are being honest about what is true and false, because their income depends on it. The problem with people is that they are unmoored, with absolutely no sources of information that are not trying to squeeze cash out of them. They come up with sketchy heuristics to give them some semblance of stability between shifts at work and climbing pointless complications in their lives created by rent-seekers. The problem with the comfortable upper middle-class is that they are too moored, too sure they're at the end of history. Too sure that they know what is true between stitching together half-remembered NYT and WaPo headlines with their discussions with each other at restaurants and dinner parties. Too sure that truth can and should be dictated by people who have a better degree than they do. As if maintaining that comfort is not an interest, as if bias towards themselves as "the middle" is actually the definition of being unbiased.
cyanydeez 5y ago
like every marketplace, what matters is the entrenched interests in the market place and the amount of space needed for a new market. when the "too big to fail" market is filled with entrenched interests and bloat themselves to take up most real estate, then ideas only compete if the existing ideas accomodate them. this is where we derive the "Uber for X" marketting speak. as such, the market
rayiner 5y ago
It's not clear to me that censorship isn't making it worse. You have a mass populist/anti-elitist movement in the country. You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses? What exactly is the end-game here? You're not going to beat (or educate) the populism and conspiracy theories out of Americans. We're talking about a country where a prominent tech billionaire died because he disregarded "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet to treat his pancreatic cancer.[1] That river is wide and deep, my friend. Telling people that the elites are controlling information sharing online for their own good is unlikely to have the desired result. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-cancer-treatment-regrets/?sh=30af5a0e7d2e https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...
- Nursie 5y ago
  > You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses? No, I’m specifically not telling you that! I’m not sure I have any good solutions but I specifically called out that censorship probably wasn’t the best plan! I just wanted to say that the concept of a marketplace of ideas, as commonly envisaged in terms of ideas with merit rising to prominence, seems to be naive, and when we’re building systems to facilitate an uncensored or uncensorable marketplace of ideas, perhaps we should keep that in mind.
- aabaker99 5y ago
  "According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%." (https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/prognosis/ https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/...) I would hesitate to say your prominent tech billionaire died because of diet choices.
  - refurb 5y ago
    He had a highly curable type of pancreatic cancer.
api 5y ago
I think you could make a basic content richness argument. There are interesting nuanced left, right, libertarian, socialist, etc. ideas but none of these are the ones discussed. The stuff that gets popular is meme level trash. Social media selects for punchy sound bites as much or more than the old media it is replacing.
robbrown451 5y ago
Glad to see your very good idea rise to the top. And this is mostly because HN, partly though the excellent work of dang, does, well.... kinda the same thing. HN is censored. And I approve.... that's why I'm here rather than somewhere like 4chan.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Ha, perhaps the success of the comment disproves its content!
CursedUrn 5y ago
How do you explain the massive list of advancements humanity made during the Enlightenment period with this attitude? Seems like you're advocating another dark age.
xyzzy21 5y ago
It's about the time constants of communication that cause this. Given time, the truth wins out. But when you accelerate communication beyond human capacitor to process it, you get what we have today.
User23 5y ago
> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. This has been well known for a couple thousand years at least. Aristotle comprehensively covered it in his Rhetoric[1]. There have always been people who can only be persuaded by rhetoric and not by dialectic. If anything, our contemporary educational system is designed to form persons to be incapable of dialectic and susceptible to rhetoric. And so the current state of affairs is unsurprising. It's strange to think that rhetoric used to be a standard secondary level subject in the West. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where virtually every moderately educated adult were well versed in persuasion tricks. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Are we sure that most, or even many adults are well-versed in things they were taught in school? My experience suggests otherwise. I would honestly struggle with trigonometry or biology today, both subjects I excelled at in school. Funny enough, in my facebook feed today there are numerous people failing to answer "50+50-25*0+2+2" correctly.
guerrilla 5y ago
> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. These are just subjective judgements. All you're saying is that people you don't share the same value judgements with won out.

by Nursie 5y ago

pankajdoharey 5y ago

Its less a "Marketplace of Ideas" and more a "church or private establishment" on the network. Even HN isnt spot on sometime bad ideas do rise up when they it appeals to peoples emotions more than sensibilities.

cratermoon 5y ago
Social media (and the internet as a whole) are shaped by and promote the values of those who create it. They allow certain interactions and not others. (to what extent are the creators the leaders of the social media companies, vs. the users?) https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/519/440 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...

throwawayboise 5y ago

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created I don't think this is unique to the online world. It's just how humans are. We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.

Nursie 5y ago
> We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe. While I agree, I think there's more to it than that, I think it's more serious than that, and I think the message amplification capabilities afforded to profit-driven (or ideologically driven) bad actors is something we've not really seen before. Certainly not at this scale. So while it is human nature, that's not to say the outcomes are desirable, nor that the marketplace of ideas concept is consistent with reality. In fact I think it might be the point, much like the perfect economic market, the concept of the well-functioning marketplace of ideas cannot exist, because of the humans that make it up.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  "major platforms’ amplification features have also caused or contributed to real damage in the world. At a societal level, they have spread misleading political material, to the detriment of democratic governance" https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-discontents https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-dis...
  - Clubber 5y ago
    The Catholic Church felt the same way about Gutenberg's press.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Gutenberg's first mass-produced book was a Latin Vulgate bible. The 40 remaining copies are among the most valuable books in the world. Gutenberg also printed indulgences for the church. It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07090a.htm https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07090a.htm
      - Clubber 5y ago
        >It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg. I wasn't talking about the man, I was talking about the machine. The Catholic Church certainly didn't love it anymore once The Reformation happened. See the Catholic Church could no longer control information when lay people could read the Bible, and Martin Luther's texts. Gutenberg's press completely transformed the church's control in Europe and it lasts to this day. https://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/reformation/role-of-printing https://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/exhibit... This has parallels today. The government can no longer control information via traditional media channels because the internet, in its current form, exists. They want that control back. I believe this is an attempt to regain control. The government would never shut down big tech companies, they are a great source of information for data collection.

spamizbad 5y ago

That's because the "marketplace of ideas" is being distorted by algorithms that are going to favor "provocative" ideas that drive clicks. Exciting lies defeat boring truths.

Nursie 5y ago
That may well be a big factor, and that's something that needs to be looked at more closely. Lots of people describe being drawn down the rabbithole by algorithmically driven suggestions which nudge them ever more extreme.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  I have thought this for a while. Algorithms are something entirely new to human discourse. Apparently I watched some alt-right-adjacent podcast or something, so for weeks youtube kept recommending seriously racist, fascist, white nationalist content. The algorithm was actively trying to lead me down the rabbit hole. Obviously it's learned that doing so increases engagement.
justbored123 5y ago
That tells you that "marketplace of ideas" is a dumb idea, because we already have proved a million times that people are not the rational creatures that we were sold we were for a long time. We are smart apes, but apes none the least: emotionally driven by our limbic system, very tribal and status seeking. Prone to rationalize all these basic impulses in a million different ways creating the illusion of rational individualism. The algorithms just shows us our true nature, don't make the mistake of shooting the messenger.
- readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  If the algorithm distorts conversation, then how can you be sure it more accurately reflects human nature? How does something that isn't a marketplace of ideas prove it's dumb? Or should this question be punished by your algorithm?

deleted 5y ago

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AlexTWithBeard 5y ago

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas There are indeed some factual mistakes floating around, mostly around covid-is-just-a-flu and the-earth-is-flat discussions. But usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such. Alas, there's no hard science in most of these issues. There is a bunch of plausible-looking speculations, philosophical theses and general thoughts. Pretty much like 17-th century physics, in 18-th century biology or 19-th century medicine were. As for the ideas being harmful... What do we do with potentially harmful, yet factually correct statements, and does the same logic apply to beneficial, but factually wrong ones?

Nursie 5y ago
I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one. But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit. > usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such. flat earth is .... well I wouldn't put it with the most harmful ideas. It's clearly very silly, and not a great thing to propagate, but so far flat earthers haven't taken their beliefs out on the road, so to speak. Antivax, now that's harmful. There are certainly all sorts of grey areas and I wouldn't want to suppress discussion of safety, of risks from emergency approval or whatever, but when you get to "The vaccine makes you infertile" and "The vaccine will kill everyone that gets it" and "The vaccine contains 5G chips that they are going to use to track you", and such views actually start to impact the uptake...
- peytn 5y ago
  > and such views actually start to impact the uptake I’m not sure that’s how the chain of causality works. We have 80s-style public health communication that isn’t effective today. People are looking for a reason to reject it. If not the 5G chip stuff, it’d be something else.
  - 5y ago

ideata20592510 5y ago

Missing from this discussion is the understanding that speech is an inalienable right. It does not need to be justified on consequentialist grounds, nor on the basis of the more pernicious metric of harm reduction. Pointing a gun at someone to silence her is a form of censorship, and so is quietly erasing her from the most prevalent communications channels (deplatforming). Figure out a way to achieve harm reduction without grotesque violations of natural rights. Until then, there will always be people who prefer dangerous speech to the safety of slavery.

TheFalun 5y ago

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” -- John Stuart Mill couldn't disagree more.

Nursie 5y ago
It is this attitude which appears to be based on an idealistic assumption that people care about exchanging error for truth. This is what I am arguing is not really the case, as demonstrated amply by the world around us.
seizethegdgap 5y ago
You're using the quote of someone who lived and died before the invention of the telephone, and also ignoring that he also advocated for a 'harm principle' (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle) which states "...that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection."
- TheFalun 5y ago
  So you think we should completely ignore anyone who has said anything of substance before any arbitrary technology was invented or if they have any other opinion that you disagree with? We can safely cast theses people's opinions out as invalid? Is that not exactly what you are implying? Do you not see how absurd those implicit arguments are? That's not to mention the fact that you are ignoring the amount of influence that man had on our political and economic systems which benefit your life in ways you probably haven't considered...

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"Often at the root of these is a profit motive." Big Tech is DOA if the web is not open for commercial use, i.e., advertising. But the web is definitely not DOA if all advertising ceased. Look at the enormous growth of the internet, the vast number of users with internet subscriptions today, billions of them using the network on a daily basis for a variety of non-commerial uses, hundreds of millions uploading content for others to consume. (Big Tech middlemen pervert this recreational usage for their own commercial uses.) The internet was not created for the purposes of advertising. (There was none in the beginning.) That is only one use. Look what happens when we allow ads without any rules. Yikes. Even if advertising were regulated, the web could still be used for commerce, e.g., processing commercial transactions.

sneak 5y ago

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. This is plausible, so people believe it. Fortunately, it is false. Compare the state of the world regarding germ theory, human rights, smoking, racism, education, the belief in violence to solve problems, or the delusion that is theism to the world 100 years ago. It used to be way, way worse. The better ideas are winning. Things are improving tremendously. It just takes time.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Those are all pre-internet. Not sure they are good examples of how the marketplace works in social media.
cdirkx 5y ago
But are those ideas winning because people are rationally chosing to believe in them in the marketplace of ideas, or just that we grew up with them and the people with contrary beliefs are dying out. There is a saying that "science advances one funeral at a time" because even professors etc., one of the most rational group of people on the planet I would think, have biases against new theories despite evidence supporting them, instead sticking to what they already know even if it would be disproven.

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PicassoCTs 5y ago

The internet has been a beautiful experiment to find out how what crank ideology aligns best to the human default instinctive nature.

wyager 5y ago

> I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. The fact that you phrase your characterization of incorrect ideas like this suggests with pretty high certainty that you don’t exactly have a great birds’-eye view of the epistemic landscape yourself. People who characterize the “opposition” this way mostly get their ideas from NPR-tier Pravda publications, and aren’t exactly better suited for picking out “better models of truth and reality”.

archagon 5y ago
The fact that you equivocate NPR and Pravda means you’ve huffed plenty of those fumes yourself.
- wyager 5y ago
  > Voting Republican is to enact fascism and tear down the tenants of democracy in the US You seem like a skilled political analyst, so I defer to your expertise. One correction - it’s spelled “tenets”.
Nursie 5y ago
I don’t characterise “the opposition” this way. I characterise some of the more prominent ‘fringe’ stuff as this. I don’t really have an ‘us’ for there to be a singular ‘them’ I’m talking about, I’m not American and I don’t identify with any particular political party.

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amelius 5y ago

> We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. It's the same with the economy. Not the best products win, but the ones with the biggest advertising budget. We should try to dampen the effect of these counterproductive forces.

version_five 5y ago

It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc). The strawman of the existence of factually incorrect content is irrelevant in my view. Everyone loves to jump on conspiracy theories or whatever other stuff is out there as proof that people (other people) are too dumb to be exposed to the world. First, I think the relevance and the number of serious adherents in the extreme version of these conspiracies etc are dramatically overstated because they reinforce a narrative. Second, I think most of it is an effect, not a cause, of people being told what to do and what to think. People uncomfortable with narratives that end in them giving something up will take shelter in alternative explanations. The problem is not the nutty theories being available, it's in the way that one group forces itself on another in the first place. All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

Nursie 5y ago
> The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary. > we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue. But no, of course, you're right, taking any action at all is akin to fascism. Totally.

pessimizer 5y ago

It's not good to both observe that crank ideas rise to the top due to the profit motive, and to think the solution could be that the people who are best at profit should get to censor speech. Maybe we attack should sleazy commerce rather than speech? The reason people go in for crank ideas is because they recognize that the people who sell them things are constantly manipulating them. They work so they don't have time to investigate everything themselves, so as a proxy many tend to believe marginal people who they don't know at all due to the signal that their speech is being suppressed by known liars who are never called out because of their power. Meanwhile, the upper middle-class people who provide the infrastructure and strategy for the biggest frauds are smug in the belief that their betters are being honest about what is true and false, because their income depends on it. The problem with people is that they are unmoored, with absolutely no sources of information that are not trying to squeeze cash out of them. They come up with sketchy heuristics to give them some semblance of stability between shifts at work and climbing pointless complications in their lives created by rent-seekers. The problem with the comfortable upper middle-class is that they are too moored, too sure they're at the end of history. Too sure that they know what is true between stitching together half-remembered NYT and WaPo headlines with their discussions with each other at restaurants and dinner parties. Too sure that truth can and should be dictated by people who have a better degree than they do. As if maintaining that comfort is not an interest, as if bias towards themselves as "the middle" is actually the definition of being unbiased.

cyanydeez 5y ago

like every marketplace, what matters is the entrenched interests in the market place and the amount of space needed for a new market. when the "too big to fail" market is filled with entrenched interests and bloat themselves to take up most real estate, then ideas only compete if the existing ideas accomodate them. this is where we derive the "Uber for X" marketting speak. as such, the market

rayiner 5y ago

It's not clear to me that censorship isn't making it worse. You have a mass populist/anti-elitist movement in the country. You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses? What exactly is the end-game here? You're not going to beat (or educate) the populism and conspiracy theories out of Americans. We're talking about a country where a prominent tech billionaire died because he disregarded "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet to treat his pancreatic cancer.[1] That river is wide and deep, my friend. Telling people that the elites are controlling information sharing online for their own good is unlikely to have the desired result. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-cancer-treatment-regrets/?sh=30af5a0e7d2e https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

Nursie 5y ago
> You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses? No, I’m specifically not telling you that! I’m not sure I have any good solutions but I specifically called out that censorship probably wasn’t the best plan! I just wanted to say that the concept of a marketplace of ideas, as commonly envisaged in terms of ideas with merit rising to prominence, seems to be naive, and when we’re building systems to facilitate an uncensored or uncensorable marketplace of ideas, perhaps we should keep that in mind.
aabaker99 5y ago
"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%." (https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/prognosis/ https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/...) I would hesitate to say your prominent tech billionaire died because of diet choices.
- refurb 5y ago
  He had a highly curable type of pancreatic cancer.

api 5y ago

I think you could make a basic content richness argument. There are interesting nuanced left, right, libertarian, socialist, etc. ideas but none of these are the ones discussed. The stuff that gets popular is meme level trash. Social media selects for punchy sound bites as much or more than the old media it is replacing.

robbrown451 5y ago

Glad to see your very good idea rise to the top. And this is mostly because HN, partly though the excellent work of dang, does, well.... kinda the same thing. HN is censored. And I approve.... that's why I'm here rather than somewhere like 4chan.

Nursie 5y ago
Ha, perhaps the success of the comment disproves its content!

CursedUrn 5y ago

How do you explain the massive list of advancements humanity made during the Enlightenment period with this attitude? Seems like you're advocating another dark age.

xyzzy21 5y ago

It's about the time constants of communication that cause this. Given time, the truth wins out. But when you accelerate communication beyond human capacitor to process it, you get what we have today.

User23 5y ago

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. This has been well known for a couple thousand years at least. Aristotle comprehensively covered it in his Rhetoric[1]. There have always been people who can only be persuaded by rhetoric and not by dialectic. If anything, our contemporary educational system is designed to form persons to be incapable of dialectic and susceptible to rhetoric. And so the current state of affairs is unsurprising. It's strange to think that rhetoric used to be a standard secondary level subject in the West. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where virtually every moderately educated adult were well versed in persuasion tricks. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/

boring_twenties 5y ago
Are we sure that most, or even many adults are well-versed in things they were taught in school? My experience suggests otherwise. I would honestly struggle with trigonometry or biology today, both subjects I excelled at in school. Funny enough, in my facebook feed today there are numerous people failing to answer "50+50-25*0+2+2" correctly.

guerrilla 5y ago

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. These are just subjective judgements. All you're saying is that people you don't share the same value judgements with won out.