> battle it out in a propaganda (the neutral definition) war

How would that be distinguished from "cancellation", exactly?

Because no one gets cancelled?

The war of ideas is a game where the goal is to get the most amount of people to adopt that idea. No part of this is removing someone's ability to speak, but they may not be listened to by the masses that don't like their ideas.

Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you support absolute free speech without any limitation. We all have a lot of rights, and exercising those rights can impinge on the rights of others. Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?

I don't know in English, but in French we have a saying: the freedom of some begins where the freedom of others ends.

I assume it would be obvious, but perhaps I'm mistaken.

Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications (I'm not sure how well this constitutionally works for private companies). This obviously doesn't count credible threats, telling people to riot or be violent, etc.

Basically you have a right to offend people short of targeted harassment.

*This is obviously an oversimplification but I'm giving the HN the benefit of the doubt here, however misguided that may be.

> Free speech in the USA is (supposed) to mean the freedom to do political speech without state ramifications

I hear this a lot, and it's not actually true. That's what the first amendment means. The first amendment protects freedom of speech, but it does not define the concept of free speech as a whole, it just protects a form of it.

It annoys me when people assert that being silenced by a private entity doesn't actually limit freedom of speech, because they argue that the freedom isn't being restricted unless a government is doing it. I'm not necessarily for unrestricted free speech (because it often ends up being loud and obnoxious, and often silences other speech when it becomes a shouting contest, especially on the internet), but this very specific interpretation that the US Constitution's first amendment actually defines free speech has always bugged me as something logically unsound.

> Why would freedom of speech be somehow special and trump every single other right?

Because speech doesn’t cause physical harm or loss to others.

Couldn't "psychological harm/turmoil" fit somewhere in there aswell? Verbal abuse etc.

generally speaking that would fall under harassment.

>"Because speech doesn’t cause physical harm or loss to others."

Nope, that is trivially wrong with the obvious counter examples being slander and libel.

Which is why they're excluded from the definition of free speech pretty much everywhere?

In the US we have the saying "your rights end at the tip of my nose" to express much the same thing.

>If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech.

I strongly disagree. Support for freedom of speech means being anti-censorship. It's perfectly coherent to believe that particular speech does harm, and also should not be censored.

Suppose you and I are top medical researchers, and we disagree about the best way to treat a disease. It's perfectly coherent for me to believe that your speech is killing people by promoting a treatment which is suboptimal/counterproductive, and also believe that your speech should not be censored.

I don't believe that your example is what the first amendment exists to protect, in fact if your hypothetical researcher is causing physical harm to people with their treatment, that's probably a criminal offense that has nothing to do with political speech.

Scientists and doctors regularly disagree with each other about which treatments are best for patient, how much heavily to regulate pharmaceuticals, etc. And who is right in those debates have far reaching consequences for human life. Thousands of people live or die every year based on those disagreements.

Ignaz Semmelweiss's life is the perfect example of this phenomenon in action, with extreme consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

He realized doctors were killing their patients by not washing their hands and cleaning their instruments. He devised simple solutions to this problem. The doctors of his day laughed him out of the room and had him committed to an insane asylum where he was effectively tortured to death.

The consensus of medical practitioners at the time was that he was a crank. But he was right. Should he have been imprisoned? Certainly the doctors of his day would have had him banned from social media for "misinformation" if they could have, and they did far worse.

We abide by the principle of free expression not because it causes the least harm in every instance, but because it causes the least harm in expectation. The value of minority viewpoints that are right about important things that the majority is wrong about will always outweigh the harm of harmful speech, in aggregate. And one thing is clear from all of human history: We are not responsible enough to tell the difference ex ante.

And in other contexts, you can imagine supporting the right of Communists to speak and organize even if you find Communism abhorrent and misguided.

Note too the benefits of allowing/supporting the right of [insert disliked political group] to speak: 1) You find out who is in that group when they speak (as opposed to them remaining anonymous/hidden online) and potentially address them directly 2) You might be able to question them to find out what led them to that position to prevent more people from going in that direction 3) You can be aware of the message that they are trying to send and counter it with more speech

In contrast, doing something like banning support for the Communist party is likely to lead to 1) more sympathy for Communism as an oppressed outgroup; 2) a lack of understanding of how extensive support for Communism is and what might be causing it; 3) the use of "Communism" as something that people can use to denounce each other as part of petty/unrelated feuds.

When should statements be outlawed?

Are people free to make untrue statements?

Are people free to make “falsified” statements?

Are statements inducements?

Do people have the right to be uninformed?

Never

Yes

Yes

No

If person A's lies have clearly and demonstrably hurt person B's reputation, relationships, livelihood, and personal safety, should they have any recourse?

Semmelweis's lies demonstrably (according to contemporary experts) hurt the reputation of the entire medical establishment of his day. Fortunately, back then, they had the recourse to put him in an insane asylum.

I just did a bit of reading on wikipedia about Semmelweis, and I think there is an interesting wrinkle which is normally left out of the Semmelweis tale. The effect size from handwashing was huge, but even Semmelweis couldn't explain why it worked. Handwashing only ended up catching on later once we had the germ theory of disease.

I wonder if a good modern analogy for Semmelweis would be if we did a study on crystal healing or Reiki, and the crystal healing/Reiki was found to vastly outperform placebo pills. (Actually something like this sort of did happen with parapsychology. The effect sizes were pretty small I believe, though.)

Obviously in hindsight, other docs still should've listened to Semmelweis. What I'm trying to get at here is that sussing out the truth can actually be a pretty tricky thing. Even if the docs had somewhat good reason to accuse Semmelweis of spreading medical misinfo, it was still a catastrophic mistake in retrospect.

That's exactly my point though. Figuring out the truth is very hard, and often our best experts are wrong about extremely important things. If our best experts can't get such critical things right, who can we possibly put in charge of censoring misinformation?

I don't necessarily mean to indict the scientists of Semmelweis's day too much. I mean, they fucked up, to be sure. However it's understandable (somewhat) why they didn't listen to him.

But a society that allows those presently in power to censor information they consider to be false is a society that helps cement its present ways of doing things for eternity. I don't think that's a good thing.

A modern example of this might be the plaque theory of Alzheimer's disease. I don't know enough to know whether this is a fair description of the state of the science, but there is certainly a growing view that, a "cabal" of believers in this theory suppressed alternative views for a long time. It may end up being that the cabal is right! But it seems to me like there's enough uncertainty that a diversity of viewpoints should probably be heard.

I was talking about speech in the context of exchanging ideas, but you bring up a very good point. In an ideal world, lying would only damage the reputation of the lier.

One indicator of the quality (or lack thereof) of a society is how easy is to damage one's reputation without evidence. That's why the whole "Believe women" movement is complete and utter bullshit.

This problem has always existed, and the social standing of person A and the social standing of person B typically determined the outcome. Platforms such as Twitter where an unfounded claim can be spread so rapidly and to such a vast number of people are also a modern thing. There's no easy answer, but having the state as arbiter of truth is never the solution.

This is the second time I've seen this specific example in this context. Where are people getting this from? And why is it being used to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis?"

I don't understand in real life how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths without the recommended treatment being resolvable in a single conversation (research so inconclusive on either as to make both treatments suspect imo). Why would either professional be presenting a treatment as "recommended" without the strong caveat of "but others of my caliber think this recommended treatment will kill you." If said caveat isn't included, surely we don't want doctors going around giving such blatantly misinformative advice?

And again why is the "free speech " blanket always cast so wide as to include this? We aren't allowed to not have Nazis around without risking restricting medical debate? Smacks of slippery slope.

> how it would arise that two medical experts could be looking at data that contradicts each other so strongly that one could believe the other's treatment is suboptimal to fatal lengths

It's happening right now (has been for 2 years) with COVID vaccines. Also permanent gender surgery performed on minors -- doctors performing them say they are saving lives, opponents say they are mutilating children below the age of consent.

>Where are people getting this from?

I came up with the example myself. You and I actually discussed it here on HN the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998494

I wasn't using that example to counter "we shouldn't tolerate Nazis". I was using it to counter the sentence I quoted: "If you view some speech as a problem then you're just not for free speech." There's an important distinction to be made between speech I think causes harm, and speech I think should be censored. That's all I wanted to say with my thought experiment.

I actually do not believe all speech should be always be protected. I agree with the MIT statement that harassment shouldn't be protected. And it seems to me that e.g. expressing support for Hitler could credibly be regarded as harassment. (Same for e.g. labeling someone as a "Nazi" because they say the US should have stronger border security.) More details on my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34135283

It seems to me that far too few "have the courage to use [their] own understanding," and that many would willingly abdicate intellectually to external authorities, provided the opportunity to do so without incurring social costs. A culture of open, potentially adversarial, discourse is incompatible with systems of thought which devalue the individual's capacity to reason, and so that culture itself is routinely undermined.

Almost no notion of free speech considers an absolute freedom to say whatever. Almost all conceptions of free speech deny the freedom to promote manifestly false and/or terroristic ideas (promoting killing a specific person, for example, almost no one considers protected speech). Always the problem is not whether there is a line, but where to draw it.

Ironically the US explicitly noted this problem when the German constitution (in the part occupied by the allies) was drawn up. So they basically introduced free*

*no nazis or similar.

Seems entirely reasonable and this whole "it isn't free if there isn't anarchy" sounds very naive.