3 ms·

This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light". Speech is not the

by kibwen 4y ago

This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light". Speech is not the point, it's just a medium for useful information. More speech is only good to the extent that it proliferates useful information. If useless spam speech is used to overwhelm useful speech, then that undermines the whole point of the principle of free speech. And with the advent of modern technology, overwhelming the useful speech is easier than ever. Our historic ideas of free speech are wholly unprepared to deal with the overflow attacks that are possible in the modern age. Is it not "censorship" to shout over someone so loudly that they can't be heard?

egeozcan 4y ago
People learn to wear sunglasses. Just stop trying to give them "the right amount of the right kind of light".
dvt 4y ago
> This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light" Completely untenable analogy. Why people say is that the solution is more speech is due to the antecedent concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die. You cannot have this sorting process in a system that stifles free speech. If you want to attack free speech absolutism, at least attack Mill's axioms, not some made-up poorly-formed straw man of an analogy.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  >while the bad ones die. I am really not seeing this.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    A.k.a. "the marketplace of ideas can remain irrational longer than free society can remain solvent".
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  > concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die This might be the core of it then, because while I generally agree with the idea of Free Speech in the abstract, I don't think that it's been having good outcomes for society in the era of the cultic milieu, and I think that has to do with this 'marketplace' idea not really holding water. (Maybe I just don't want to admit that my sense of what makes a "good idea" is wrong, and the success of eg Qanon as a meme means that I should just change my thinking and accept it as a winning meme and therefore a Good Idea.)
  - dvt 4y ago
    The problem with alternatives to the "free marketplace of ideas" is that they are all (by definition) authoritative. And who's the best "authority" here? The government? Me? You? Who decides what ideas get to be censored? Imo, there's more problems with the authoritative model than the marketplace model. Kind of like Churchill's famous quote about democracy: "it's the worst form of government, except from all the others that have been tried."
    - kibwen 4y ago
      This was true in practice before technology made communication and synthesized speech trivial. Unfortunately for us all, we no longer live in a world where "more speech is unambiguously better" is true. Technology has ruined the meme of free speech. I'm not saying there are any unambiguously good alternatives; we are all diminished by its loss. But clinging to its corpse isn't doing anyone any good. As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. An uncompromising philosophy like "more speech is always better" is quite a different thing. We need a new rallying cry to replace the meme of free speech, probably something to do with the notion of signal:noise ratios, but it's beyond me to invent such a meme.
      - dvt 4y ago
        > As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. But it's the same with free speech: you said it yourself, there's a lot of noise, that's the compromise. You don't know what the "one true Good Opinion is" until you hear from everyone, and that might include racists or nazis or whatever. I don't really think technology has anything to do with it. In fact, the printing press probably made a much larger impact on speech than the internet did (and we got through that just fine).
- kibwen 4y ago
  Re: "the marketplace of ideas", there is a modern philosophy that ascribes mythical qualities to markets, but the fact is that markets are not magic, they are merely useful tools that are appropriate for some contexts and inappropriate for others. There are numerous ways markets can either fail or be worse than useless, and one of those ways is by obscuring information about the market, and it's increasingly trivial to use unfettered free speech to effectively censor any other market participants, thereby distorting the market.

by kibwen 4y ago

egeozcan 4y ago

People learn to wear sunglasses. Just stop trying to give them "the right amount of the right kind of light".

dvt 4y ago

> This is a bit like saying "the darkness is bad, so the solution is light, and if the light ever becomes blinding, the solution is more light" Completely untenable analogy. Why people say is that the solution is more speech is due to the antecedent concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die. You cannot have this sorting process in a system that stifles free speech. If you want to attack free speech absolutism, at least attack Mill's axioms, not some made-up poorly-formed straw man of an analogy.

kristiandupont 4y ago
>while the bad ones die. I am really not seeing this.
- kibwen 4y ago
  A.k.a. "the marketplace of ideas can remain irrational longer than free society can remain solvent".
WaxProlix 4y ago
> concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die This might be the core of it then, because while I generally agree with the idea of Free Speech in the abstract, I don't think that it's been having good outcomes for society in the era of the cultic milieu, and I think that has to do with this 'marketplace' idea not really holding water. (Maybe I just don't want to admit that my sense of what makes a "good idea" is wrong, and the success of eg Qanon as a meme means that I should just change my thinking and accept it as a winning meme and therefore a Good Idea.)
- dvt 4y ago
  The problem with alternatives to the "free marketplace of ideas" is that they are all (by definition) authoritative. And who's the best "authority" here? The government? Me? You? Who decides what ideas get to be censored? Imo, there's more problems with the authoritative model than the marketplace model. Kind of like Churchill's famous quote about democracy: "it's the worst form of government, except from all the others that have been tried."
  - kibwen 4y ago
    This was true in practice before technology made communication and synthesized speech trivial. Unfortunately for us all, we no longer live in a world where "more speech is unambiguously better" is true. Technology has ruined the meme of free speech. I'm not saying there are any unambiguously good alternatives; we are all diminished by its loss. But clinging to its corpse isn't doing anyone any good. As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. An uncompromising philosophy like "more speech is always better" is quite a different thing. We need a new rallying cry to replace the meme of free speech, probably something to do with the notion of signal:noise ratios, but it's beyond me to invent such a meme.
    - dvt 4y ago
      > As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. But it's the same with free speech: you said it yourself, there's a lot of noise, that's the compromise. You don't know what the "one true Good Opinion is" until you hear from everyone, and that might include racists or nazis or whatever. I don't really think technology has anything to do with it. In fact, the printing press probably made a much larger impact on speech than the internet did (and we got through that just fine).
kibwen 4y ago
Re: "the marketplace of ideas", there is a modern philosophy that ascribes mythical qualities to markets, but the fact is that markets are not magic, they are merely useful tools that are appropriate for some contexts and inappropriate for others. There are numerous ways markets can either fail or be worse than useless, and one of those ways is by obscuring information about the market, and it's increasingly trivial to use unfettered free speech to effectively censor any other market participants, thereby distorting the market.