4 ms·

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 go

by 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).
joshfee 4y ago
I think a large part of the problem we have today is lack of attribution. It is too easy for participants to pretend to be 1000 voices instead of a single voice. I don't think being able to pretend to be multiple people is particularly helpful to the "marketplace of ideas". Conversely if I see/hear the same sentiment a 1000 times and can distinguish between "1000 voices" and "one voice a thousand times" then that is useful for me determining how much weight to give to those ideas when forming my own ideas. The other nice aspect of attribution is that there is a factual answer to "who is speaking". I don't need to evaluate the merits to your speech in order to understand who is speaking. In today's world it may not be easy/possible to know the specific answer to "who is speaking", but by observing any speech I know that there must have been _someone_ speaking. As for how to get to a world with attribution... not so sure what the options are that don't suffer a lot of the same problems. But it at least seems like an approach that doesn't require authoritative assessment of the underlying speech itself to yield societal benefits.

by dvt 4y ago

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).

joshfee 4y ago

I think a large part of the problem we have today is lack of attribution. It is too easy for participants to pretend to be 1000 voices instead of a single voice. I don't think being able to pretend to be multiple people is particularly helpful to the "marketplace of ideas". Conversely if I see/hear the same sentiment a 1000 times and can distinguish between "1000 voices" and "one voice a thousand times" then that is useful for me determining how much weight to give to those ideas when forming my own ideas. The other nice aspect of attribution is that there is a factual answer to "who is speaking". I don't need to evaluate the merits to your speech in order to understand who is speaking. In today's world it may not be easy/possible to know the specific answer to "who is speaking", but by observing any speech I know that there must have been _someone_ speaking. As for how to get to a world with attribution... not so sure what the options are that don't suffer a lot of the same problems. But it at least seems like an approach that doesn't require authoritative assessment of the underlying speech itself to yield societal benefits.