> So, who gets to decide?
Each individual gets to decide for themselves.
No need to give everyone the job to be clever - we can actually blacklist any opinion we dont want to see circulated and vote on it.
In the U.S. the Bill of Rights outlines specific rights that cannot be infringed, including the freedom of speech. Now, this amendment could technically be repealed but that is a very high bar since it’s considered a fundamental right by which the others are derived.
Edit: downvotes are fine but at least add to the discussion. I would be interested in hearing what parts you think I’m not interpreting correctly
The reason is straightforward - without free speech, nobody would know if/when the government is abusing any of your other rights.
Obviously people looking for an expedient authoritarian mandate to limit speech within the boundaries of what they consider to be acceptable see the existence of free speech as the allowance of that which is outside their boundaries, but they don't actually understand the purpose. The purpose is a hedge against tyranny with a trade-off. People get to say horrible, stupid, counterproductive things, but your political enemies don't get to constrain your ability to express yourself.
I also don't understand why the rest of the world is so eager to see this right stripped in America...I would feel extremely claustrophobic if there was no place on earth in which free communication wasn't enshrined in law. Even if Europeans want to mandate their own speech, they still benefit from the hedge against tyranny by such a place as America existing.
A vote is simply not the same thing as a choice.
How would you feel if 51% of the people voted to force you to become a Druid?
I’d hate to live in a place where a joke can get you jailed.
When there are large asymmetries (for example, in information or risk) regulation can be warranted. For example, most people feel regulating fissile material is prudent because the risk of it coming into the wrong hands is too high to just let unchecked freedom ring when it comes to owning it or not.
Legal adults, however, have a fundamental right to hurt themselves.
Yes, I know there are grey areas.
Sometimes I think people confuse what they wish/think the government role should be with what is explicitly defined within the social contract between the government and the governed.
The claim that unvaccinated people are a breeding ground for more effective versions of the virus sounds like a Big Pharma talking point, rather than something with solid science behind it. My understanding is that environmental pressure results in mutated variants becoming widespread. Couldn't vaccines themselves cause this? The virus hardly mutated for a whole year, but then once inoculations became available it seems that more infectious variants are popping up left and right.
1 person has no meaningful effect but collectively their actions are capable of doing great harm to the rest of us even if we all collectively act in our own best interests by getting vaccinated and participating in other public health measures.
If your freedom to act irrationally allows you to cause my untimely death I don't understand how my inability to go on living wouldn't represent a net decrease in freedom vs forcing you to vaccinate.
If you look at the break down of anti vaxxer sentiment only 9% are dead set against vaccination under any circumstances. These people's perception of their freedom isn't worth hurting everyone.
Mutations and variants occur all the time as the virus reproduces. Variants are not a response to any vaccine; they have appeared primarily (entirely? I haven't been following all of them) in regions where the vaccine is not yet widely available because that is where the virus is able to multiply (and thus mutate) the fastest.
A real life/modern example of this can be found in Marek's disease in chickens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
The counter claim seems to be that because vaccination reduces the abundance of the virus there is a lower chance of mutations. It's hard to say which effect is stronger and it probably varies greatly by virus and by vaccine!
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, just an armchair enthusiast.
Interesting theory though, I don't think it's true right now, but potentially there may be evidence I'm not aware of.
“Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
You may have the personal freedom to get drunk—that doesn’t give you the freedom to drive around while under the influence and you endanger everyone else on the road.
The choice to be vaccinated or not is not a choice that affects merely the individual; its consequences affect communities. Regardless of whether it is valid or not to refuse vaccination, it is not solely within the realm of personal freedom and should not be treated that way.
This is not true, any more than it is for vaccinated people.
Viruses will still spread through a fully-vaccinated population, and they will still mutate in a fully-vaccinated population.
The CDC released a report [1] showing proportional numbers of cases coming from fully vaccinated people (74% of cases against 69% of the population fully vaccinated).
Treating people who are not getting the vaccine as enemies is not going to convince us. In fact, this whole thing has made me, in particular, suspicious of other vaccines that I will research and make decisions for myself about.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7031e2-H.pdf
One need only look at the overlay of cases and vaccination rates across different US states to show you’re just flat out wrong.
Similar manner to drink driving, sober people can also hurt others when driving.
This is about where we draw the line. When it comes to drink driving and antivaxxers they both endanger others to an unacceptably high level.
The tongue in cheek point I'm trying to make is that too much of the conversation focuses on relative risk. Relative risk obsession has people not taking more risky, but still incredibly safe (at least in the short term) vaccines here in Australia. Absolute risk (or its delta) tends to be a much more salient number to the victim.
It does help the antivaxx crowd in some circuitous arguments however, as the chance of an unvaccinated person killing a vaccinated person is low if vaccines work!
Also, calling people unvaccinated agency COVID anti-vaxxers, when most are not, is likely to lead to some becoming that.
Other way around. Evil would convince you that leaded gasoline is fine, and that "good intentions" of regulating lead out of gas are evil because government power.
The bigger justices, like the U.S. bill of rights - that's for the greater good. Having laws and order. That's for the greater good too. As are judges, police, government, etc. All the greater good that requires people to comply.
-People you believe are saying true things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying false things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying nice things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying mean things get to speak.
Everyone gets to speak. Individuals get to decide.
Its not a cut and dry issue either. If you were to own a site, anyone forcing you to post things to your site you don't believe is also an infringement of your rights. It cuts both ways.
In my eyes the major issue is the consolidation of discourse onto a few private forums, not whether or not those forums should be able to police themselves.
Whoever wants to. and then people can compare the competing arbiters and decide who would earn their trust. That used to work with mass media until the internet came along. Now we no longer have multiple newspapers, but "The Newspaper" , "The TV" and "The telegraph" (Twitter?), like 2-3 news sources in total which are basically politically aligned. The name of the game changed from "popularity and copy sales" to "the network effect". I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet, but perhaps at some point people will realize that the network effect is evil and it will get a bad name.
The internet, centralising… what went wrong?
I personally follow the law so I don't go to jail, since historically it has been made by idiots.
People will always be fallible. Processes, however, can layer checks and balances in a way that people often can’t. Processes are also easier to change than people in my experience.
Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”
> Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”
Agreed. My use of the past was to illustrate a basic truth: given the big (colossal) failures of the past, is it more likely we have largely found the truth, or that we are still very far away from it? It's impossible to know of course. That said, the amount of people who will claim their truth is ultimate and all of who do not see it their way must be idiots is staggering. It's human nature though, I literally did that one comment above.
If factual veracity faced a similar system that tries to balance the needs and desires of all participants, then censoring misinformation would be a lot more palatable (and would still, like our justice system, often be wrong.) The current system of supressing misinformation has none of the check and balances contained in the legal system and adding those in would do a great deal to facilitate trust in that system.
- Advertise pornography
- Plan attacks against the United States government
- Advertise medical cures that the government doesn't approve of
- Sell counterfeit products
- Pump and dump a stock
- Reveal the identities of CIA operatives
All of these are thoughts, just as much as advocating against vaccines or for alternative cures or what-have-you are thoughts.
Who gets to decide any of the above?
Would it be a good idea to set up society such that all of the above thoughts are protected speech?
If you think any of these things in your own mind but don't take any action on it that is perfectly ok and carries no legal risk.
What is the argument that saying "Ivermectin is being suppressed by Big Pharma, anyone who takes it will get cured of covid" is simply a thought whose publication is worthy of both social and legal protection, but saying "Contoso has a groundbreaking product they're going to reveal next week, anyone who buys the stock now is sure to make a profit" is illegal securities fraud? How do you distinguish those cases?
Clearly MailChimp (or any other service) can't knowingly allow their platform to be used to violate the law, or they would be held accountable.
If certain types of bad thoughts are illegal to spread, the argument, I would think, is they should stop being illegal.
(On a more practical note, Mailchimp's legal department is not a court of law. If freedom of speech / of thought-spreading is important enough to your society that you want to place legal obligations on private companies' platforms not to interfere with it, as TFA advocates, I think a natural consequence is that private companies should not decide what crosses the line and what doesn't, and probably that private companies should not be liable for what's said on their platform. In fact, that's more or less what Section 230 gives us! In a world with strong free-speech protections, it seems to me that Mailchimp should say that you can send whatever you want through their service, and should be encouraged by the government to take that approach, and that if you send something illegal, that liability is on you alone, after due process of law.)
There is nothing wrong with advertising the truth that certain medical treatments exist which are not government approved in the US, or, legal in the US, but are defintely viable, and are actively used in other parts of the world, or, could be by physicians for off-label use.
domperidone [1] is a drug that is used for a few indications overseas. There is an active discussion around it on a number of social media sites, but the FDA warns against importing it, for violating an FDA Act. It is possible to get an exception for one indication in the US, potentially...... But, many women want it because it helps with lactation, and for a woman with a hungry infant, this is a big issue. You get a screaming baby that wants 8 oz more of milk a day, and lemme tell you, can't negotiate with a screaming baby! Off Label uses of medications also, is common among Physicians. Viagra is one drug that has a number of utilities in off-label use.
BigTech squelching the conversation around Domperidone is fairly similar to BigTech squelching the standard COVID treatment protocols [2], from Zelenko [3] & McCullough [4], which will likely become standard of care fairly shortly, and are now in evidence on CDC websites too [5], but significantly trailing the most updated protocols. But they don't squelch Domperidone talk, and the reason is simple. Pushing vaxxes are a big priority for the govt, while going after the discussion of secrets for increasing breastmilk outputs would probably be bad optics.
> actual violations of the law, at least in the United States.
Covid protocols have nothing to do with actual violations of Law, and, they will be standard of care shortly, as the CDC website writing [5] is on the wall.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30000430/
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/stop-ignoring-the-evidence-on-co...
[3] https://vladimirzelenkomd.com/zelenko-prophylaxis-protocol/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...
Was this really necessary? How many engineers do you know, and how many of them actually ascribe to this belief?
There is a significant overlap (higher than a random person's picked from the population) between engineers and what I would call "fundamentalist rationalists". That is, people who believe in reason and science to the point they wrap the speedometer back around to religious belief again. Those people become unable to think outside that framework and consider nuanced solutions. Not everything worth solving has measurable or falsifiable solutions. The world can be very uncertain and work against all common sense at times. This doesn't mean one shouldn't attempt to make sense of it obviously, but science does not a god make. It may, hopefully, but pretending it is that way now is no good.
Accepting uncertainty doesn't mean abandoning objectivity. On the contrary - difficulties in objectively measuring things or falsifying hypotheses are best handled with mathematical tools, which absolutely can work with uncertain quantities (that's what probability theory is for). Throwing hands in the air and saying "it's too difficult therefore there's no objectivity", or "it can go whichever way, so it may as well go the way I like", is not the solution.
There is no golden hammer however. To give a concrete example, I believe our understanding of mental issues using a scientific framework is woefully inadequate. In the future, we may posses enough information to be able to apply scientific principles. In the present, we have managed to control some mental illnesses to a degree using pharmaceutics.
Talking with various people who have had the misfortune of being born with troublesome minds and experiencing my own mind has led me to believe that a large amount of mental illnesses, especially depression and anxiety, are misidentified due to our infatuation to treat the mental plane as analog to the physical body, so as to be able to apply our scientific knowledge to it. The body is hardware, hard and physical, the mind is software, it is changeable. Many are born into this world however without the necessary tools or aptitude to actually go through this process of change and heal their mind when it gets into a broken state. Their frustrations pile up, making them ever more ineffective, all while they are blind to the fact that they could wake up the next day and.. feel completely fine.
It is none of their own fault in a way, as these skills are barely ever taught, and not too many people seem even aware that it's something just as possible as moving your arm. They treat it as if the only way they can "get fixed" is external, as if their car broke down.
Humanity did and still has ways of undergoing these processes. Rituals of progression from one stage of life to another, as well as yearly/monthly etc. rituals affirming one's position in life were more important than they are nowadays. As much as "they do nothing", the mental effect was most definitely not nothing. The human brain always seeks meaning, and lack of stimulus is its greatest enemy.
That is not to suggest that the world was an idyllic paradise full of meaning before. Unlikely. But it's hard to deny God did die somehow.
No true engineer believes that. All engineers must make compromises. Anyone that uses black and white thinking simply cannot engineer (unless you are using the term in a strictly legal sense).
Once, in America, it was universally acceptable that censoring speech is not the power somebody should get. Neither the government, nor anybody else. Of course, as with every ideal, the reality sometimes came short of it - there are many infamous examples of censorship, both governmental and otherwise, that happened in America. But those ultimately were realized as conflicting with the ideal - and ultimately, the ideal won and they have lost.
Today, this ideal is increasingly being abandoned - for the large parts of the Left, have already completely been abandoned - for the ideas of "safety" and narrow partisan political considerations. The nation - and the whole culture we call "Western culture" - will suffer a lot and regret a lot if we don't find a way to stop it.
It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".
There is only misinformation according to some party.
"Google is going to remove misinformation from YouTube." sounds incredible laudable to the modern ear.
"Google is going to remove things that are misinformation according to Google corporate policy." is much less compelling.
A challenge for anyone reading this: From now on, whenever you read the word "misinformation", fill out the "according to ..." yourself. I've been doing it for a while now. It really improves your perspective.
(I do believe in objective truth. However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Whatever the objective truth may be, I seriously doubt "according to the corporate policy of X" is it.)
I'm sorry, but this is complete BS. If someone makes statements that they know are false, then they are a liar and are spreading misinformation. If someone makes statements for which they have incontrovertible proof, this is absolutely not misinformation.
Just because the gradients between those two are complex, doesn't mean that misinformation doesn't exist, just that the definition of "misinformation" is fuzzy (like so many other words.)
(I don't believe in objective truth or meaning. I do believe that communication is impossible without mutually shared subjective truths and meanings.)
Edit: The reality is that there is a significant amount of misinformation put out by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. Some of it (e.g. some press releases) is widely recognized but also generally tolerated. Some of it is partisan. Some of it is widely accepted as truth by almost everyone.
My point is that "misinformation" should always come attached with an "according to X". Some Xs are more reliable than others.
However, as I said and will certainly stand by, "according to Google corporate policy" or "according to Facebook corporate policy" is not one of the more reliable of them. Google and Facebook corporate policy is not in a position to be making that determination, and whatever metrics they are using it is certainly not any definition of truth I recognize.
There's also going to be quite a lot of disagreement about which of those Xs are reliable and how much. This disagreement is not suddenly resolved by stripping away the provenance of statements and letting the word "misinformation" float free without worrying about provenance. It is absolutely valid to discuss how much to trust a given source, but the propaganda word "misinformation" is like the passive voice of propaganda... it isn't misinformation according to X or according to Y, it's just... "misinformation", floating free and objectively determinable. It's a pretty serious step back in philosophical sophistication.
I also think there's a lot of people accepting "misinformation according to our global elite" who, if they thought about it a bit more clearly, would wonder why they're accepting that definition so easily and thoroughly.
The value of specifying epistemic sources is as important when putting forward information as it is when labeling misinformation. Yet most people are generally pretty lax at including and verifying epistemic justifications (especially for claims they are inclined to agree with.)
It is true that the act of labeling things as misinformation can itself be a form of misinformation.
The issue, as I see it, is that we have accepted the practice of deliberate misinformation as long as it is "for a good cause". We don't place as much value in people trying accurately convey information and nuance as we place on the function that information is serving.
I see this everywhere: in the statements about masks that were made early in the pandemic to make sure healthcare workers had supplies. You see this is narratives about the last election. You see this is in a lot of the reporting about Russiagate. There are little to no consequences or reprobation from people who agree with the end goals.
The incentives are all wrong and I don't know how they get fixed, but the problem is much bigger than just "Big Tech", "Social Media" or a bunch of stupid people on the otherside of the partisan divide.
Talk about highschool level sophistry. "Nah bro, there are no facts, everything is meaningless, the truth is a lie and all lies are true, man!"
Please.
> I do believe in objective truth.
Oh good, I'm glad you took the time to contradict yourself.
> However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon
So misinformation exists but we'll never be able to identify it?
I repeat: please.
The world is not flat. The anunaki don't exist. COVID vaccines don't contain microchips.
This isn't even a little bit hard.
Does it get hard in the muddy middle? Sure. But your claim that 'There is no such thing as "misinformation"' is pure bunk.
Now, I don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop. What I do care about is that this was absolutely not misinformation. And then the same happened again for the lab-leak hypothesis. Given pants-on-fire dismissal and declared "debunked," when it wasn't then, and has been shown to very clearly not be now.
So, yes, the abuse of the authority is obvious in the hypothetical, but the relegation to the abstract isn't even necessary to condemn the legitimacy of these self-proclaimed institutions.
Personally, my bar for 'insurrection' involves at least one gunshot. You can differ! But it's not objective.
a violent uprising against an authority or government.
They violently forced their way into our capital with the idea of intimidating the government to prevent them from handling the lawful business succession insofar as counting and acknowledging the lawfully cast electoral votes.
This isn't subjective its the simple literal dictionary definition of the word.
They didn't fight with the cops they beat and murdered cops in order to destroy democracy itself.
Why only a gun? What about the police officers that were beaten?
In a nation with as many guns as America, especially in the right wing demographic, I'd expect some shooting and a lot more organization before I upgrade from 'riot'. Insurrection is just political spin. Look at that picture with the goofball holding the speaker's podium and tell me these people were serious.
And I'm assuming you mean one gunshot "from the aggressors" as one of the Capitol Police officers did fire their weapon in defense of the Capitol.
What would you call a group of armed people who forcibly enter a building in order to disrupt the work of a government and install an unelected leader to a position of power?
However, I think he brings up a very important point: who gets to decide what's misinformation?
* Private organizations are run by fallible humans, chasing money and reduced liability
* Governments lie. If you don't believe me, read any history book
* Scientists are not a spherical mass floating in a vacuum with a unified opinion, nor are they correct by default
Furthermore, only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.
So, who gets to decide? Who gets the power of saying what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good? Is it someone you agree with? What if it changes to someone you don't?