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If I misunderstood, can you elaborate on “it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefore he should be silenced. The
by dahart 5y ago
If I misunderstood, can you elaborate on “it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefore he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed.“?
You seemed to defend and frame Rogan’s speech as if it was part of a beneficial citizenry probing corrupt government officials, and it seems like you downplayed the potential harm of spreading vaccine misinformation as being balanced out by the abstract harm of censorship.
- mordymoop 5y agoI think that discussing both sides of a cost-benefit calculation will always sound like “downplaying” one side if you happen to think that one side of the calculation is obviously and straightforwardly the weightier. The way a utilitarian would approach this (not my preferred framing but not a bad one here) would be to say “how many deaths did vaccine misinformation cause, in expectation, probabilistically?” which is very hard to estimate, and then “how many deaths would result from the elimination of Enlightenment free speech norms qua norms?” which is even more impossible to even estimate. If we have a nuclear war because anti-war speech is suppressed (again: a thing that has happened historically) and three billion people die then “obviously” speech suppression was more harmful than vaccine misinformation. But this is the kind of thing that will only be obvious when it is too late. To put it succinctly, you think I’m minimizing the harm of vaccine misinformation, and I suspect you’re minimizing the probable harms of normalizing speech suppression, and maybe we’re both somewhat right about the other.
- dahart 5y agoIt sounds like I didn’t misunderstand your top comment after all.