I agree with the overall message, but I think we need to discuss this in the context of current reality, not pure theory.

First, neither copy the chinese system or vote by sortition are currently realistic alternatives.

Second, it's not like free speech exists in purely theoretical space. Free speech in an empty room is not interesting. Free speech before the press is not like free speech after. Free speech now is not like it was in the 90s. Youtube and fb genuinely created a lot more freedom of speech in practice. They also monopolize it.

Lets not pretend that there aren't costs, regardless of what way this happens.

That said, a world where the public, advertisers and politicians lobby a beseech youtube to restrict speech is a nasty one. This is going to be ugly.

> Or, if the problem is uninformed people, then adopt a representative democracy where a random sample of 1000 voters are chosen by sortition

I can see why that would help with corruption, but I’m not sure why it would help with a population being uninformed, let alone misinformed.

The candidates will have a lot of time to inform the voters, rather than having to communicate in soundbites.

People think that because it was their honest hope/belief that technology would work to amplify ONLY the kind of information they like: Vote liberal, open the borders, affirmative action everywhere, include tech elites in decision making, heavier taxes for everyone above my income bracket, condemn every country who is not a western liberal democracy. When they realized that technology is amplifying EVERYBODY voices from the town's loony to ideological enemies they want to reign the system back, they dont want actual freedom, they want finely tuned control masked as a virtue.

Good points. I also hoped that the internet would make everyone smarter by allowing anyone to read physics papers and watch videos on how to build a pc. But we are social creatures, so here I am posting on a message board instead.

That Internet existed, until 1996 or so. It still exists somehow, but what % of the population at any given time do you expect will be reading Wittgenstein or Braudel, or looking forward to the next Witten's preprint? 10%, 5%, 1%? The scary thing is that now he have Fields Medal winners claiming that 2+2 could be 5 only to not appear as an asshole before the digital Robespierres.

> abolish democracy and copy the Chinese system.

That's exactly what a bunch of serious and respectable people want to do: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid...

"In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

This is what influential people in the US actually believe and tech policy people follow along.

The end game is hard radicalization towards fascism by movements like qanon, which structurally encourages its followers to take matters into their own hands and commit acts of violence based on modern Blood Libel.

I dont think issue is uninformed people or people in general not making sensible decisions.

Large issue is euphemisms we use and collective inability to call spade a spade. Misinformation about covid does not randomly happen because uneducated Johny randomly something something. It happens, because well educated people intentionally spread it as a way to acquire or keep power. It also happens, because Youtube algorithms are easy to use by smart educated actor in order to promote whatever that person want to promote. And the people who put time and effort into this tend to be overwhelmingly bad actors.

I watched "triumph of will" once and then I was getting holocaust denial videos suggested for months. I was not getting history or lectures tho. After a while that went down. Then, I watched some gaming videos and started to get such materials again.

That is to point out that for whatever reason, youtube itself is promoting these things. It is not "people in general", I sure as hell was not seeking these materials. And maybe if we have been able to admit out loud that it is not just some teenagers cosplaying white supremacists or stupid hippy moms promoting anti-vaccins, but instead well organized political groups pressing for own agenda, we would be better off.

Because current discussion about speech is absurdely naive.

The end game that is feared is the fall of civilization mirroring the collapse of the western roman empire, and it’s quite possible in a thousand years people will peg the collapse of our civilization as having started around 1950 or so.

With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much less have any ability to replicate, and the government of the global hegemon inches away from collapse into autocracy, people are afraid of dark ages, but most of them can’t quite articulate it.

Rome fell and a big part of europe and the mediterranean lost the ability to maintain cities many of which dumped 90% of their populations to the countryside. Specialization gone, most people were just doing subsistence agriculture. Literacy plummeted to almost no one outside a very very few people in monasteries.

This whole religious adherence to party aligned mythology about everyday things (say, vaccines) is pervasive in the western world, and it is not some surface defect, it’s a rot that goes through to the core.

But things have been pretty nice as long as almost everybody has been alive so the belief that everything will continue to be fine is about all that holds things together.

People don’t appreciate how precarious civilization is.

That is a fair concern, and I share it, but one can hardly blame that on social media. The Romans didn't have anything like our modern conception of social media, and they managed to collapse just fine without it. The problem as I see it is that fighting other Romans became more profitable for the Roman decision makers than fighting their neighbours.

Social media is an effective tool which can be used as a weapon, but the problem isn't that Americans have effective weapons; it's that they're incentivised to use them against each other. The solution to me seems pretty obviously a return to federalism. It's the fact that there is only one throne that makes everyone fight for it with whatever is at hand rather than build things up locally.

Because the neighbors were Romans.

> the collapse of our civilization as having started around 1950 or so

The pessimist (or realist) in me tends to agree, that a fundamental shift occurred after the second world war. What exactly is the nature of this change is hard to say - something about the dominant ideology of the ruling class, the relationship of wealth, business, politics and governance - maybe.

At the same time, this period has been one of the greatest maturing and flowering of our collective global civilization. Not to go all Pinker ¹, but the optimist side of me wants to believe that the cultural and technological advances we've made have enough momentum to overcome the negative tendencies that are possibly bringing us to the brink of collapse.

¹ https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/international-poverty-line-ip...

> What is the end-game that is so feared?

Personally, I am afraid of very large media companies making AIs that have utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans without their consent.

But that's not AIs. That's 'the algorithm', and has long since already been made. Hell, it was made in Germany in the 1930s: it's called 'radio'. Radio is STILL used to change the behavior of humans.

I'm not nearly as afraid of the very large media companies doing this as I am of HUMANS taking the controls of such a machine and using it for that very purpose. Very large companies, AIs, nations are aggregates and don't inherently take wild radical positions.

Individual humans do. We're the random factor, the chaos feeding the genetic algorithm, we're supposed to get up to some crazy extreme stuff that will sink or float on the larger scale depending on how it affects society. But when we are able to amplify our individual whims to the scale of companies or countries, which is ALWAYS through using these utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans whether that's exploiting YouTube or radio, there's trouble.

I'm not nearly as worried about AI or aggregate entities like corporations. I'm worried about the existence of these utility functions, and before radio it was 'the broadsheets' and yellow journalism, and before then maybe it was nefarious clay tablets or papyrus.

Power corrupts, and individual whims aren't good models for healthy societies. We keep rediscovering this over and over, and sometimes the civilization collapses, and sometimes it doesn't. Here's hoping if we do get AI, it has some insights into this and why its own existence hinges upon not blowing up the underlying levels (of corporations, of individual people, of cells and the well-being of the individual people).

I feel like the 'thine arm/subgroup/demographic is unclean, cast it out and burn it cos it's eeeevil' is far more often an individual human perspective, amplified by these utility functions because somebody LET that human do that.

45% of US adults think vaccines are unsafe.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/aoa-4oa06241...

Wildly misleading statement, especially given the tiny sample size versus hundreds of millions of adults in the US.

From that same link (demonstrating Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines; which is obvious given the high vaccination rates in the US):

"While the vast majority (82%) chose in favor of vaccines, 8% selected responses expressing serious doubt. An additional 9% said they were unsure."

Also:

"In a survey of 1,025 randomly sampled adults, 84% of respondents said they believed that it is extremely or very important that parents vaccinate their children"

"Additionally, 86% believed vaccines are not more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, whereas 89% said they are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of vaccines."

https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20200116/faith-in-vac...

None of this disagrees with the link I posted. In fact your own link quotes different research saying:

The poll showed that only 45% of Americans believe vaccines do not cause autism in children.

And as the link noted, measles needs a 95% vaccination rate to be stopped effectively.

> If the people as a whole can't be trusted to make sensible decisions and judgements then abolish democracy and copy the Chinese system.

Wow, I've never seen an argument for fascism so casually mentioned. I'm talking about 'abolish democracy'.