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> Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but

> Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but shutting down medical professionals and medical academics and so on is very concerning. No I don't agree with censoring _any_ voices - precisely because of this issue. The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me. If a centralized authority wields power in a way that creates negative consequences, you don't give them _more_ power, or just hope that they'll do the right thing.

dredmorbius 4y ago
"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries." – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html)
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Disinformation and misinformation are noted tactics used by those who would seize control of levers of power and use them to their own ends as well. Control over information is a fundamental tool of power and warfare (cf: Arendt, Mill, von Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and many others). Ascribing it to any one faction, or presuming all factions seeking power are uniform and unified, is another fallacy (broad brush) . Those who seek to base power on democratic principles, for the maximum number and good, have at least a more altruistic objective to their credit.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      Fortunately I didn't ascribe or presume any such thing. > Those who seek to base power on democratic principles, for the maximum number and good, have at least a more altruistic objective to their credit. Those who seek power within ostensibly democratic systems aren't basing power on those systems though, they're trying to gain power by the means available to them. And those who claim they are out to do good with power are deserving of no particular credit for it.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 (https://archive.ph/qJQFO https://archive.ph/qJQFO) We can look to what the past accomplishments (consistent with present actions), and stated goals are. Many see significant differences. Blair said it well: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8327593-the-party-seeks-power-entirely-for-its-own-sake-we https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8327593-the-party-seeks-pow... Where actions are power-seeking and rationales, justifications, and/or inspirations are grossly inconsistent, Blair's description seems to fit.
        bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Blair being Orwell. It amused me to think of Tony Blair saying what you quoted though.
        throwawaylinux 4y ago
        No, I did not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 I never "ascribed it to any one faction", nor did I "presume all factions seeking power are uniform and unified". You may retract your false assertion and furnish me with an apology at your earliest convenience. > Where actions are power-seeking and rationales, justifications, and/or inspirations are grossly inconsistent, Blair's description seems to fit. And we can certainly look back over history to show that governments, including allegedly "democratic" governments, and corporations and the wealthy who have lied and deceived and conspired to commit atrocities and crimes, wars, coups, invasions, genocides, slavery, and plundering others of their wealth and natural resources. It's not the carpenter who wonders why her business has to shut down or the dad wondering why his 6 year old may not go to school that society needs protecting from. It's the people who lie to go to war for oil and arms dealers.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    But everyone believes in some censorship so it’s disingenuous to claim one side believes in free speech and others don’t. Both sides want to censor harmful activity it’s just a question of what bar of harm they are using. Some people want to censor only things like child porn. Others want to censor things like the TidePods challenge too. Still others want to censor quack cures that don’t work that people might die from using in place of actual treatment. The problem with bad free speech is that people aren’t accountable to it. If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility.
    - throwawaylinux 4y ago
      Are you implying I was being disingenuous or claiming one "side" believes in free speech or others don't? I wasn't aware that I was even talking about "sides". > The problem with bad free speech is that people aren’t accountable to it. If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility. I don't know what "bad" free speech is or why people wouldn't be accountable for it. People absolutely should be accountable for damage to others caused by their actions (including speech). That is the foundation of the civil legal system and does not mean you can't have free speech. > If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility. Well fraud and other things should be able to cover a lot of situations like this. A lot of the rest should be covered by the listener taking responsibility for themselves too. And what is left... I don't claim to be perfect or immune to abuse. I don't see how you are constructing an argument though. "Here is a bad hypothetical thing that I'm alleging that free speech might allow to happen". So... what's exactly the point here? What does that make free speech worse or better than? Does government and corporations mass censoring people stop them from lying to one another or convincing each other of fallacies? And it can just as easily be spun the other way too here's my hypothetical -- if the US government and their corporate owners and media sycophants had not lied and bullied and intimidated and effectively censored people into not speaking out against the war in Iraq, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. My position isn't that "free speech" is perfect, or that it has to be absolute without limits or not at all because that would apparently be hypocritical. It is that those with the means and power to enact censorship have also been the ones responsible for lies, atrocities, theft, wars, and injustice. And that we shouldn't be comfortable with censorship whether its directly by the government or by corporations at the behest of the ruling class who happen to own the government. And that people shouldn't be fooled (for the nth time) by their crocodile tears and pleas about the greater good and how they are in it together with us (and therefore they need to keep us quiet).
majormajor 4y ago
> The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me. It'll magically take care of itself? Based on what evidence?
- s3r3nity 4y ago
  Based on all of recorded history. For example, we didn't need the Vatican, a king, or some other central committee to tell us that the sun was the center of our solar system - eventually the data and market of ideas exposed the best & correct ideas. The best disinfectant for bad ideas is more sunlight - not coverups.
  - MrMan 4y ago
    not true - people are susceptible to propaganda and marketing. lies spread mimetically, truth does not
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    It feels different now, as if the quacks have voice-amplifying tools they didn't have hundreds of years ago. Tools that have been painstakingly engineered to exploit bugs in the human brain's OS.
    - buscoquadnary 4y ago
      People said the same thing when they invented the printing press and the radio and pretty much any other time it suddenly became easier for people to get their message out. On the whole I tend to view it as a good thing overall rather than a negative.
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        I agree, but still... it feels different this time, somehow. Maybe because few people had the means to shout everyone else down in the past. When everybody has a printing press or a radio station, it turns out that the noise floor gets really high. Everybody spends more time writing and talking, and less time reading and listening. We're finding that the ability to boost your signal above the noise floor isn't even vaguely correlated to the merits of the message, the way overcoming resistance from editorial gatekeepers was in earlier times. Freedom of the press used to be the exclusive preserve of those who owned one, and that wasn't right, but now it goes to whoever yells the loudest, and I'm not convinced that's going to work out better for us all in the long run. Sure hope it does, but early signs aren't inspiring.
krapp 4y ago
>The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me. Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  The box office flop of Morbius
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- s3r3nity 4y ago
  > Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort. This is literally how most scientific progress is made.
  - krapp 4y ago
    No, scientific progress is made by people educated in a particular field of study in the work of prior authorities in that field, making hypotheses and following established experimental methods, then publishing their results for review and verification by their peers. In other words, by the "centralized authority" of scientific consensus. Science absolutely does not work by just letting everyone believe whatever they want and somehow just expecting the truth to "win."
    - s3r3nity 4y ago
      I would call a group of educated professionals debating all sides / data for a particular hypothesis, coming to a general consensus after rigorous evaluation and debate, essentially what the "market of ideas" is meant to convey. What you don't see here, for example, is any mention of a "President of Science" or other committee making that call, nor particular suppression of lines of inquiry.
space_fountain 4y ago
Isn't twitter part of the market of ideas? The NYT ect? The idea that we could have an information ecosystem devoid of human judgement is new or at least not widespread before the internet. It was part of a utopian idea, not entirely different from the ethos powering say crypto that we could encode simple rules and the truth would filter to the top, but that isn't how the public square worked before the internet, quite the opposite, your ability to reach anyone outside your town was pretty dependent on a small handful of companies and those utopian thinkers never really managed to show the rules they came up with for how that information should be spread resulted in truth
abeppu 4y ago
I don't think on any time scale that the marketplace of ideas is sufficient to get rid of quacks. There are plenty of popular health-related practices which have had plenty of time to demonstrate their clinical efficacy, but which have failed to do so. Acupuncture, reiki, homeopathy etc all have people that believe in them despite the absence of evidence. But on _short_ timescales, during an emergency when people are emotional, and in a context where media can benefit from amplifying a message whether or not it's true ... we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it. I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Clubber 4y ago
  >we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it. >I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe. Honestly, neither is curated news. At the time of this poll, 41% of people who identified as Democrats believe that if someone caught covid, their chance of hospitalization was 50% or higher. The actual number is 1-5%. Massive amounts of Republicans and Independents also believed this as well. You assume a fair, pure and incorruptible curator, which doesn't exist. Censorship isn't the answer. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shootings-kamala-harris-tax-deadline-2021.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting...
mc32 4y ago
In principle I agree with you but in practice quacks take advantage of people’s weaknesses, so it’s a balance between open marketplace and some very basic rules. But I agree with you in principle.
wonderwonder 4y ago
"The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room" This used to be the case, it no longer is in the time of social media. The voices of the quacks are amplified and they gain legions of followers. Just look at the rise of Q as an example and the current political climate. Any crazy fact can be thrown out and if it supports their world view, a good percentage of people will believe it without looking any deeper than what the guy on Twitter said.
- TimPC 4y ago
  This was never the case unless you have a very strange reading of history. Look how long bad ideas like witches causing problems persisted and the popularity of mob justice for such acts.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dredmorbius 4y ago

"the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries." – John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html)

throwawaylinux 4y ago
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Disinformation and misinformation are noted tactics used by those who would seize control of levers of power and use them to their own ends as well. Control over information is a fundamental tool of power and warfare (cf: Arendt, Mill, von Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and many others). Ascribing it to any one faction, or presuming all factions seeking power are uniform and unified, is another fallacy (broad brush) . Those who seek to base power on democratic principles, for the maximum number and good, have at least a more altruistic objective to their credit.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Fortunately I didn't ascribe or presume any such thing. > Those who seek to base power on democratic principles, for the maximum number and good, have at least a more altruistic objective to their credit. Those who seek power within ostensibly democratic systems aren't basing power on those systems though, they're trying to gain power by the means available to them. And those who claim they are out to do good with power are deserving of no particular credit for it.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      You did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 (https://archive.ph/qJQFO https://archive.ph/qJQFO) We can look to what the past accomplishments (consistent with present actions), and stated goals are. Many see significant differences. Blair said it well: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8327593-the-party-seeks-power-entirely-for-its-own-sake-we https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8327593-the-party-seeks-pow... Where actions are power-seeking and rationales, justifications, and/or inspirations are grossly inconsistent, Blair's description seems to fit.
      - bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Blair being Orwell. It amused me to think of Tony Blair saying what you quoted though.
      - throwawaylinux 4y ago
        No, I did not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103825 I never "ascribed it to any one faction", nor did I "presume all factions seeking power are uniform and unified". You may retract your false assertion and furnish me with an apology at your earliest convenience. > Where actions are power-seeking and rationales, justifications, and/or inspirations are grossly inconsistent, Blair's description seems to fit. And we can certainly look back over history to show that governments, including allegedly "democratic" governments, and corporations and the wealthy who have lied and deceived and conspired to commit atrocities and crimes, wars, coups, invasions, genocides, slavery, and plundering others of their wealth and natural resources. It's not the carpenter who wonders why her business has to shut down or the dad wondering why his 6 year old may not go to school that society needs protecting from. It's the people who lie to go to war for oil and arms dealers.
- TimPC 4y ago
  But everyone believes in some censorship so it’s disingenuous to claim one side believes in free speech and others don’t. Both sides want to censor harmful activity it’s just a question of what bar of harm they are using. Some people want to censor only things like child porn. Others want to censor things like the TidePods challenge too. Still others want to censor quack cures that don’t work that people might die from using in place of actual treatment. The problem with bad free speech is that people aren’t accountable to it. If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Are you implying I was being disingenuous or claiming one "side" believes in free speech or others don't? I wasn't aware that I was even talking about "sides". > The problem with bad free speech is that people aren’t accountable to it. If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility. I don't know what "bad" free speech is or why people wouldn't be accountable for it. People absolutely should be accountable for damage to others caused by their actions (including speech). That is the foundation of the civil legal system and does not mean you can't have free speech. > If you convince someone of a quack cure and they try it and die as a result even if they have proof they tried it because of what you said it’s very difficult to hold you to any legal accountability. The net result is speech that has freedom from responsibility. Well fraud and other things should be able to cover a lot of situations like this. A lot of the rest should be covered by the listener taking responsibility for themselves too. And what is left... I don't claim to be perfect or immune to abuse. I don't see how you are constructing an argument though. "Here is a bad hypothetical thing that I'm alleging that free speech might allow to happen". So... what's exactly the point here? What does that make free speech worse or better than? Does government and corporations mass censoring people stop them from lying to one another or convincing each other of fallacies? And it can just as easily be spun the other way too here's my hypothetical -- if the US government and their corporate owners and media sycophants had not lied and bullied and intimidated and effectively censored people into not speaking out against the war in Iraq, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. My position isn't that "free speech" is perfect, or that it has to be absolute without limits or not at all because that would apparently be hypocritical. It is that those with the means and power to enact censorship have also been the ones responsible for lies, atrocities, theft, wars, and injustice. And that we shouldn't be comfortable with censorship whether its directly by the government or by corporations at the behest of the ruling class who happen to own the government. And that people shouldn't be fooled (for the nth time) by their crocodile tears and pleas about the greater good and how they are in it together with us (and therefore they need to keep us quiet).

majormajor 4y ago

> The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me. It'll magically take care of itself? Based on what evidence?

s3r3nity 4y ago
Based on all of recorded history. For example, we didn't need the Vatican, a king, or some other central committee to tell us that the sun was the center of our solar system - eventually the data and market of ideas exposed the best & correct ideas. The best disinfectant for bad ideas is more sunlight - not coverups.
- MrMan 4y ago
  not true - people are susceptible to propaganda and marketing. lies spread mimetically, truth does not
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  It feels different now, as if the quacks have voice-amplifying tools they didn't have hundreds of years ago. Tools that have been painstakingly engineered to exploit bugs in the human brain's OS.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    People said the same thing when they invented the printing press and the radio and pretty much any other time it suddenly became easier for people to get their message out. On the whole I tend to view it as a good thing overall rather than a negative.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      I agree, but still... it feels different this time, somehow. Maybe because few people had the means to shout everyone else down in the past. When everybody has a printing press or a radio station, it turns out that the noise floor gets really high. Everybody spends more time writing and talking, and less time reading and listening. We're finding that the ability to boost your signal above the noise floor isn't even vaguely correlated to the merits of the message, the way overcoming resistance from editorial gatekeepers was in earlier times. Freedom of the press used to be the exclusive preserve of those who owned one, and that wasn't right, but now it goes to whoever yells the loudest, and I'm not convinced that's going to work out better for us all in the long run. Sure hope it does, but early signs aren't inspiring.

krapp 4y ago

>The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me. Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
The box office flop of Morbius
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
s3r3nity 4y ago
> Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort. This is literally how most scientific progress is made.
- krapp 4y ago
  No, scientific progress is made by people educated in a particular field of study in the work of prior authorities in that field, making hypotheses and following established experimental methods, then publishing their results for review and verification by their peers. In other words, by the "centralized authority" of scientific consensus. Science absolutely does not work by just letting everyone believe whatever they want and somehow just expecting the truth to "win."
  - s3r3nity 4y ago
    I would call a group of educated professionals debating all sides / data for a particular hypothesis, coming to a general consensus after rigorous evaluation and debate, essentially what the "market of ideas" is meant to convey. What you don't see here, for example, is any mention of a "President of Science" or other committee making that call, nor particular suppression of lines of inquiry.

space_fountain 4y ago

Isn't twitter part of the market of ideas? The NYT ect? The idea that we could have an information ecosystem devoid of human judgement is new or at least not widespread before the internet. It was part of a utopian idea, not entirely different from the ethos powering say crypto that we could encode simple rules and the truth would filter to the top, but that isn't how the public square worked before the internet, quite the opposite, your ability to reach anyone outside your town was pretty dependent on a small handful of companies and those utopian thinkers never really managed to show the rules they came up with for how that information should be spread resulted in truth

abeppu 4y ago

I don't think on any time scale that the marketplace of ideas is sufficient to get rid of quacks. There are plenty of popular health-related practices which have had plenty of time to demonstrate their clinical efficacy, but which have failed to do so. Acupuncture, reiki, homeopathy etc all have people that believe in them despite the absence of evidence. But on _short_ timescales, during an emergency when people are emotional, and in a context where media can benefit from amplifying a message whether or not it's true ... we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it. I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Clubber 4y ago
>we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it. >I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe. Honestly, neither is curated news. At the time of this poll, 41% of people who identified as Democrats believe that if someone caught covid, their chance of hospitalization was 50% or higher. The actual number is 1-5%. Massive amounts of Republicans and Independents also believed this as well. You assume a fair, pure and incorruptible curator, which doesn't exist. Censorship isn't the answer. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shootings-kamala-harris-tax-deadline-2021.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting...

mc32 4y ago

In principle I agree with you but in practice quacks take advantage of people’s weaknesses, so it’s a balance between open marketplace and some very basic rules. But I agree with you in principle.

wonderwonder 4y ago

"The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room" This used to be the case, it no longer is in the time of social media. The voices of the quacks are amplified and they gain legions of followers. Just look at the rise of Q as an example and the current political climate. Any crazy fact can be thrown out and if it supports their world view, a good percentage of people will believe it without looking any deeper than what the guy on Twitter said.

TimPC 4y ago
This was never the case unless you have a very strange reading of history. Look how long bad ideas like witches causing problems persisted and the popularity of mob justice for such acts.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]