4 ms·

> These regularly lead me back to trying to find pithy summations of specific paths through this mire, such as "deplatforming is not censorship, it is failure t

> These regularly lead me back to trying to find pithy summations of specific paths through this mire, such as "deplatforming is not censorship, it is failure to provide or sell a megaphone," and, "we need to reason about 1A the way we do about 2A," (ie in terms of understood liberty vs aggregate societal harms). This is one of the scariest paragraphs I’ve seen on HN in some time. Who exactly gets to reason about these changes? How do we change 1A and no cause censorship? Our political parties have thrown the entire nation into division and one side wants to limit speech while the other doesn’t. So what do we do? Implement a dictatorship? While we’re here, 2A has not cause societal harms, the humans did. Separate them already. The amount of gun owners vs those shooting up places have a very very very wide margin.

aaroninsf 5y ago
By "we" I mean, we as a society. Me, you, all of us. By "reason" I mean, we need to have open debate about where the appropriate line today is in various domains between competing goods and aims. The conflict is often as here, between collective interest, and individual liberty. Not the time or place reopen/rehash well-trod arguments, but I will observe that from the perspective of someone who believes in gun control, and to my point about the analogy, our collective problem actually is precisely that humans are regardless of good faith intentions, defined by predictably acting out of accord with those intentions, and hence we as society have reason to seek to regulate and mitigate the impact of force multipliers. In the US, guns are the most well-known force multiplier in the domain of interpersonal conflict. But today the force multiplier which arguably has orders of magnitude more impact, is "speech." The distinction between "people" and their tools is IMO specious. Humans have agency; what is at issue is that given that agency, what do we agree about tool use? Reasoning about "free speech" does not === censorship. It means, we need to educate people to have a better mental model of what our industry (here on HN) is capable of doing and is doing, in the feedback system which marries surveillance and the construction of personalized information streams. The short-hand way for describing this is a good start: it amounts to stochastic mind control. No individual may be "programmed," but our industry and its clients put billions of dollars and literal and political fortunes among other resources, into the presumption that our current tooling is capable of producing discernible changes in collective behavior. We argue here and elsewhere regularly as professionals about the ethics and consequences of using this system to e.g. provoke consumption. When I say we need to reason about speech, I am myself most interested in us coming to terms with, and finding a way to survive as a society which e.g. values individual agency (call it liberty if you prefer), when that same tooling over the last decade especially has increasingly been used and with exponentially increasing power, to drive social and political behavior. In the US this is most evident and most clearly a present danger wrt the fomentation of tribalism, in specific tribes which are largely defined by their anti-democratic, anti-communitarian, authoratarianism, married by convenience and inclination to racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the exhausting catalog of other permanent social horrors. Twitter, or the online ad market, are no more "free speech" in an Originalist sense than a contemporary semi-automatic weapon is a musket. In bother cases, we need to understand and apply Constitutional law to find the appropriate balance between collective and individual interests, and what I saying is, we need to do so with an honest discussion of evolving power dynamics given that individuals now have at least hypothetical access to force multipliers. To make this concrete: the 2016 and 2020 elections were subject to asymmetrical information warfare. Asymmetry in the terrorist sense: a small but motivated group, such as the GRU, is capable of provoking catastrophic disruption. I do not posit any particular answers. But we need to have the hard discussion, the sooner the better.
- tekknik 5y ago
  > in the feedback system which marries surveillance and the construction of personalized information streams. You've continued to terrify me. How can we construct "personalized information streams" without censorship? By definition you either allow someone to view information outside their stream, or you don't. It clearly sounds like you're saying we shouldn't allow people to construct their own streams, but have someone else do it for them. Therefore censorship. > I do not posit any particular answers. > But we need to have the hard discussion, the sooner the better. And again, what would the results of this conversation be? You have one side demanding control over speech, and the other demanding no control over it. One side, once some perceived threat arises, wants total control and extermination of the perceived threat. Yet the other side doesn't perceive this threat. The other side believes this threat to be an authoritarian attempt to stifle non-aligned speech and thoughts. What great societal damage has you wanting to control speech so much? COVID? Vaccine hesitancy?

aaroninsf 5y ago

By "we" I mean, we as a society. Me, you, all of us. By "reason" I mean, we need to have open debate about where the appropriate line today is in various domains between competing goods and aims. The conflict is often as here, between collective interest, and individual liberty. Not the time or place reopen/rehash well-trod arguments, but I will observe that from the perspective of someone who believes in gun control, and to my point about the analogy, our collective problem actually is precisely that humans are regardless of good faith intentions, defined by predictably acting out of accord with those intentions, and hence we as society have reason to seek to regulate and mitigate the impact of force multipliers. In the US, guns are the most well-known force multiplier in the domain of interpersonal conflict. But today the force multiplier which arguably has orders of magnitude more impact, is "speech." The distinction between "people" and their tools is IMO specious. Humans have agency; what is at issue is that given that agency, what do we agree about tool use? Reasoning about "free speech" does not === censorship. It means, we need to educate people to have a better mental model of what our industry (here on HN) is capable of doing and is doing, in the feedback system which marries surveillance and the construction of personalized information streams. The short-hand way for describing this is a good start: it amounts to stochastic mind control. No individual may be "programmed," but our industry and its clients put billions of dollars and literal and political fortunes among other resources, into the presumption that our current tooling is capable of producing discernible changes in collective behavior. We argue here and elsewhere regularly as professionals about the ethics and consequences of using this system to e.g. provoke consumption. When I say we need to reason about speech, I am myself most interested in us coming to terms with, and finding a way to survive as a society which e.g. values individual agency (call it liberty if you prefer), when that same tooling over the last decade especially has increasingly been used and with exponentially increasing power, to drive social and political behavior. In the US this is most evident and most clearly a present danger wrt the fomentation of tribalism, in specific tribes which are largely defined by their anti-democratic, anti-communitarian, authoratarianism, married by convenience and inclination to racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the exhausting catalog of other permanent social horrors. Twitter, or the online ad market, are no more "free speech" in an Originalist sense than a contemporary semi-automatic weapon is a musket. In bother cases, we need to understand and apply Constitutional law to find the appropriate balance between collective and individual interests, and what I saying is, we need to do so with an honest discussion of evolving power dynamics given that individuals now have at least hypothetical access to force multipliers. To make this concrete: the 2016 and 2020 elections were subject to asymmetrical information warfare. Asymmetry in the terrorist sense: a small but motivated group, such as the GRU, is capable of provoking catastrophic disruption. I do not posit any particular answers. But we need to have the hard discussion, the sooner the better.

tekknik 5y ago
> in the feedback system which marries surveillance and the construction of personalized information streams. You've continued to terrify me. How can we construct "personalized information streams" without censorship? By definition you either allow someone to view information outside their stream, or you don't. It clearly sounds like you're saying we shouldn't allow people to construct their own streams, but have someone else do it for them. Therefore censorship. > I do not posit any particular answers. > But we need to have the hard discussion, the sooner the better. And again, what would the results of this conversation be? You have one side demanding control over speech, and the other demanding no control over it. One side, once some perceived threat arises, wants total control and extermination of the perceived threat. Yet the other side doesn't perceive this threat. The other side believes this threat to be an authoritarian attempt to stifle non-aligned speech and thoughts. What great societal damage has you wanting to control speech so much? COVID? Vaccine hesitancy?