> Speech standards should be determined by public opinion To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement?

> Speech standards should be determined by public opinion To confirm, you are making a normative "ought" statement here, not just a descriptive "is" statement? > science has never had a seat at the table in the West. This is a strange idea to me. As a simple example, vaccinations are mandatory for a reason. The unfreedom there is clearly justified. > If anything Communism was the pro-science approach, typically centrally planned societies love science and technocrats - they put a lot of effort into working out a true and optimal way and it didn't work very well. The body count can be staggering. What James Scott called high modernism is indeed bad. The problem was not the fact that science was used, but the fact that the models used weren't complex enough to describe local conditions, and that politically motivated models (e.g. Lysenkoism) gained prominence. Science was also used in other parts of the world to much better effect, such as vaccines and HIV medications. > The moment we start talking about speech standards being set by "science" you get a lot of people who are pretending that their thing is scientific. Ditto reason and evidence. True, and yet some of those people are more correct than others. This is challenging, but it is not a challenge we can run away from. > The win for free speech is setting up a situation where people who are actually motivated by science, reason and evidence can still say their piece without threatening the powerful actors in the community. And limiting the blast radius of the damage when they get things wrong despite being technically correct. But principles of free speech go far beyond what is true, correct and reasonable. I think people not applying reason is far, far worse of a problem today than people applying it.