I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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Notes -
There is something comical to me about this having 0 points on this site, to me it's a well intentioned post and title and yet it will never work (perhaps that is simply my view however). I would posit that this is even more general where leftism used to be tightly linked with class and freedom of speech and now is the thing that has been most "poisoned" over the past decade, and previous people who held that label have the poisoned choice of abandoning it and making it seem less sane or trying to market a new term. There is also a clash between purist-types who would advocate freedom of speech despite a large coalition who had no respect for it for years and (I don't know) realistic/pragmatic types who I would not even say it would be hypocritical to want revenge/retaliation instead.
Whenever there is a drift of terminology from a core useful idea (like what has happened to "freedom of speech") I often meditate on whether others believed the original idea at all. It feels a bit bleak to think of it that way, though.
It's even more ironic when you read the comments, because not a single one of the responses demonstrate they understand what freedom of speech actually is.
So they are actually demonstrating my point by example. I do not care about "Open Ideas", I care about a proper understanding of actual freedom of speech.
The fact that people are downvoting reflexively, and not a single one of the replies seems to be interested in the history of freedom of speech and what is was supposed to mean, proves my point.
This thought drives deep into the whole point of actual freedom of speech.
Ideas are never static: they evolve over time. The idea of "freedom of speech" is no exception: it started as one thing, it evolved to something else, and then devolved to something entirely different. Virtually no one today ask the question why was "freedom of speech" introduced in the first place, in the 17th century. Even less interested in how this term evolved over time.
All they care about is that they can say "freedom of speech doesn't mean X", when that suits their purposes, of course. But since its inception, the importance of freedom of speech what it is, the importance was what it ought to be.
If we start from scratch with a new term such as Open Ideas, people would be forced to actually think and argue what Open Ideas ought to be, regardless of what they wrongly believe freedom of speech "is". But somehow that is not obvious to this supposedly intelligent and knowledgeable audience. At least, not the vast majority of them.
It seems to me you are the only one that gets what to me is obvious.
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The social justice decentralised meme labs work shockingly fast - when they went all-out during COVID, three days was slow. This is a fool's errand; you cannot switch terminology fast enough to outflank them, and you'll look like you've something to hide by trying.
They can try, and they might temporarily succeed, but eventually they'll lose, because truth always wins in the long run.
That's precisely what most freedom of speech thinkers argued.
Also, it's not 2020, in 2025 social justice warriors are losing the culture war. The newer generations are not buying their propaganda any more.
Oh, I'm not for a second saying that they can't be beaten. They can be beaten. What I'm saying is that you can't just get around their memes by switching terminology. That is the fool's errand - and is what your post is advocating.
The way to win is to confront them head-on. They're fast, but they're not unstoppable.
Yes you can. That's the whole point of rebranding.
They will have to come up with entirely new memes.
How is that working out?
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Relabelling an unpopular idea rarely, if ever, works. The fundamental problem is that free speech, called by any other name, is no longer popular. If you doubt this fact, find whatever the most incinidary post of the day made by a [left/right] aligned person is, then ask a [right/left] aligned group if said speech should be "platformed".
The reality you have to operate in now is one where free speech, is deeply unpopular, insofar as said speech is something inflammatory that the reader is outraged by. The slogan you so despise is just people broadcasting their honest, genuine intent: "there should be consequences to speech I disagree with".
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We should tabboo both "freedom of speech" and your proposed "Open Ideas." The contention in these debates is that we have an obligation to forebear from certain courses of action in response to certain speech acts by others. Almost all the discussion of interest is in: what actions? What speech acts? The First Amendment concerns certain actions and certain speech acts but once we go beyond it things rapidly become murky.
Imagine I have a friend A and one day A shared with me some opinion I consider repugnant. So much so it makes me rethink my friendship with A. I act cooler and more aloof in our interactions. I don't invite A to social events as I once would. Did I breach an obligation to A by these actions? Was I obliged to continue being A's friend? Does it depend on the details of what they said?
Go a step further. I accurately relay A's remark to other individuals who are mutual friends. They decide to end their friendship with A, similarly to me. Did our mutual friends have an obligation to remain friends with A? Did I have an obligation not to relate true information to my friends?
To the extent we may accurately portray A as being our feeling censored, that someone has breached a moral obligation, who did so and how did they do it?
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
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I personally draw the line at trying to punish people for failing to adequately punish A. Discontinuing your friendship with A is fine, accurately telling friend B what A said even if that is likely to make B stop being friends with A is fine, but if you blow up your friendship with B because you told them what A said and they didn't blow up their friendship afterwards then YTA.
I get where you are coming from. Relevant ACX:
This is of course absurd. Failure to adequately punish a behavior is only fractionally as bad as the primary offense. Still, I do not think that it is entirely wrong. Like, if you are posting pictures of yourself hanging out with your buddy who is sporting a swastika tattoo, then I am going to draw conclusions not only about his but also your character. Of course, specifics matter. If you also have buddies who are into Pol Pot, daesh and NAMBLA, I will be more likely to consider you terminally apolitical. If you have made a big deal out of your other buddy wearing a USSR shirt, then I you will go into my mental drawer labeled "likely Nazi-adjacent".
I apply the same heuristic for social media companies. If you only block stuff which you are required to block as a matter of law, that is fine with me. If you block everything slightly offensive to anyone, that is also fine (even though it makes your platform much less useful). If you selectively block stuff, then I will infer your own political leanings from it.
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This is getting into the weeds of an interpersonal form of "cancel culture" that doesn't seem a good fit for mass society questions regarding the same. It's too untenable as well, tabooing simply disengaging from people who've said things that rub you wrong the way. (And in any case, I think more often you disengage because they've outright lied about you (fraud) or actually treated you badly (harm like not paying you back) not expressed something abstract about the world. Those that do the latter are almost to a T progs, if you're like me living in a blue culture.)
Where does the interpersonal sphere end and mass society begin?
You could start by asking if you already know the person involved (either the one you're talking to or the one you're talking about).
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Ok, what are the things "mass society" is obliged to not do in response to a member's speech? How do the obligations on "mass society" differ from the obligations on any particular individual?
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Addressing your specific example:
I don't see why any of these considerations are relevant. I am obliged to self-censor, to not relay a true thing that happened to me, out of an obligation to third parties? What if some of our mutual friends noticed and inquired why I was no longer friendly with A? Am I obliged to lie to them about why?
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I hate to make everything into an object level thing but, I think it really does depend on whether there is a broad social consensus that A's opinion really is repugnant.
There is a desire in the post-enlightenment liberal universalism to insist that everything to be resolved on the meta level -- that one has to adopt a rule without any concrete referents and then to accept every substitution into them.
And, quite frankly, this is in general a wonderful invention. Hoisting these things into a second order algebra is a powerful social technology. Here, however, it seems to be taken too far.
I think there’s a very big problem in people not understanding the difference between sharing an opinion and being an asshole about said opinion. I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics. You think abortion is baby murder, you are perfectly free to say that. But I think the very concept of politeness and tact and decorum is pretty lost at this point. It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.” And now we have people celebrating a murder with TikTok dances.
I keep thinking back to reading old etiquette books. There was a sense that you really should strive to think of the other person, or others around you as at least as important if not more than you. A society that frowned on being late to a show because walking in late would inconvenience other theater goers would absolutely have something very politely negative to say about the absolute shit show of political and social discourse— even if they do agree that all opinions are protected by free speech. There are lines of decency that just have to be protected and we just can’t seem to separate the idea of an opinion from the expression of that opinion.
That is true. On topics where there is a live social controversy (most of the Culture War), this is probably ideal.
At the same time, I think this can be weaponized to by people that want to express ideas that are beyond the pale and who want to reap the social approval of having people accept their views because of "etiquette". One particular example that comes to mind is the voluminous academic (at least in the sense of "coming from the academy") literature rehabilitating the "Minor Attracted Person" and wanting us to take this idea seriously. It's a demand for social acceptance of something that society ought not accept.
Of course, the inverse kind of weaponization happens as well -- cancel culture as an entire phenomenon is predicated on wielding this against views for which there is no social consensus. The fact that some views are outside the window of acceptable discourse is temptation enough to realize that one can try to put one's opponents views in that bucket.
[ And of course, this is all inside the bounds of free speech. But then again agitating someone's employer to get them fire for asserting there are 2 genders is also free speech. That doesn't solve much. ]
Being polite doesn’t mean accepting every idea that comes along. It simply means that you express your disagreement in ways that, to paraphrase the rules of this place “give light rather than heat.” That’s entirely possible even in cases like pedophilia where the acceptance of such a bad idea would be a disaster. Saying there are only two genders is perfectly within the bounds of free expression and I don’t think you should be harassed or fired for that. Saying something like “there are only two genders and those who disagree should be considered dangerous to society,” that is over the line. Saying “Trump should not be sending the National Guard to American cities” is fine, saying “Trump is doing an authoritarian power grab by sending the National Guard to American cities” is too far because words like authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, and related are incendiary and dangerously lead to the acceptance of violence against anyone smeared with those terms.
How do you deal with the Euphemism treadmill problem within this logic? "Nigger Rigged" isn't polite and can get a guy in trouble, so construction workers start calling it "Afro Engineered" but we all figure out what that means so they just start calling it "Ghetto," in polite company calling something or someone Ghetto has obvious uncomfortable racial implications, a lot of black lawyers are going to bristle at a white person calling something of theirs Ghetto, even if they themselves would use the term disparagingly in another context. The implication remains the same, and over time the new euphemism becomes rude as well. Moron becomes an insult so we get Retarded which becomes a slur so we get Special Needs and kids start calling each other shortbus.
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I think I didn't communicate it clearly. People that profess pedophilia should be ridiculed and shunned. It's not a matter of accepting the idea, it's the very fact of openly brandishing that constitutes the harm to the social fabric.
The rules of The Motte are not applicable to society at large, any more than the rules of the Oxford Debate Club or the Japanese Parliament.
I’m talking about mostly civilian discussions of political issues, especially over the Internet. It does no good to tear apart communities and create the conditions for political radicalism and political violence. In fact that’s the worst thing that could happen. Societies that radicalized and created the conditions for political violence are generally shit-holes, places with zero social trust, weak economies and crumbling infrastructure. Much of Latin America is like this, parts of the Middle East, and some parts of Southeast Asia. Nobody really wants to live there anymore because of the poor conditions caused by the political chaos.
Right, and I think when there is a real division in the community, we do have a higher obligation than when fringe elements try to pass off their ideas.
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It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
On the contrary, lots of things are dangerous., A foreign policy that increases the chance of nuclear war is dangerous. Not putting up a stop sign at a busy intersection is dangerous. It just is not true that "danger" means "should be defended against with violence".
Blurring together "is dangerous" and "should be met with violence" is exactly the issue.
That's a good point. "Dangerous" is meaningless unless it's a strong and direct effect. Perhaps "calls for something which is against my human rights". This has to actually be true, it's not enough to argue "It's an attack of my person that you don't give me special rights which suit my uniqueness".
How people interpret dangers is strongly influenced by propaganda, so if you convince group X that group Y is out to get them, group X will start attacking group Y in perceived (but non-existent) self-defense. I feel that this second part, the interpretation, is where most conflict happen. Actual value disagreements seem minor. Perhaps the value hierarchy (order of priority) is different, though.
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Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
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The thing that gets me about this is that, as a leftist/progressive/blue tribe child deep in the blue tribe bubble in the 90s/00s, I was taught that tolerating people with whom we share no core values was an obvious net-positive, because it's only by tolerating such people that we learn the errors in our own values that we are inevitably and necessarily blind to.
Of course, I eventually figured out that the people who taught me this were simply liars who wanted to use this as a tool to force people with very different core values than ours to tolerate and even cooperate with us, without any desire to reciprocate. "When you are powerful, I ask for mercy, etc." and all that. Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
It does seem like there's something in the human brain that makes crab-bucketing your own tribe to the top by crushing everyone else far more seductive than uplifting your own tribe to the top by improving itself, and I'm not sure if there's a way around that. The one thing I'd say is that I'm highly skeptical of enforcing tolerance through the oppression of an iron fist, because, as someone who wants tolerance, of course I'd believe that it's okay to achieve it by crushing people who disagree with me; I'm biased towards discounting their suffering and stretching logic to justify why they deserve to suffer, and as such, my judgment that "the cost of the suffering of those who were crushed is worth it for the gain in tolerance" isn't credible.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
Separating oneself from the threat might be an acceptable substitute in a vacuum, but again I doubt that it will be a lasting solution; Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant. Consider the British Raj banning the practice of sati, or USAID funding feminist theater in Central America. Do you think your enemies' values are more like those of the Protestants or those of the Aztec?
There's a bunch of Islamic extremists on the other side of the world. So long as they stay on the other side of the world, why should this be a problem to me? They are far away, they do not rule me, I have nothing particular to gain from ruling them. Why not just leave each other alone?
They should recognize that this is a bad idea and stop doing it. No one has a strong enough claim to moral clarity to impose their morality over the whole world, and if this is a thing people think needs to happen, I agree if and only if it's my morality being imposed. The flaws with this idea should be obvious enough that we can coordinate an end to the practice, even with a considerable amount of values-incoherence.
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you. While the progress they have made towards this end has been entirely thanks to sympathetic elements in your midst, before they were allowed to advance their agenda inside accepted bounds they quite infamously attempted to advance it outside accepted bounds.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit. You talk about how progress is a myth and how there is nothing new under the sun; why would you ignore the eternal appeal of conquest?
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Europeans have not needed to coordinate with anyone other than themselves to impose morality for at least 500 years, and modulo China they still don't. To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
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In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing. Multiple groups with mutually incompatible values can all gain value from a cease-fire. And also from abundance.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature." Perhaps tolerance really is like Communism in that way? It's not out of the question. But, indeed, people want more good things and fewer bad things - that's exactly why one would be motivated to tolerate others who have incompatible values with oneself and limit power struggles to mutually agreed-upon places; it's bad to live in a warzone or to expend resources and blood to crush one's enemies sufficiently to make it peaceful, and it's good to live peacefully. Depending on the specifics, which one's better than the other can change, since the blood lost in crushing one's enemies could be worth it and having to live around people whose values you disagree with could be sufficiently soul crushing to be not worth peace. I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America. I do think we have many people actively trying to encourage others to suffer from observing the lack of suffering of [people they disagree with sufficiently], so I could see the argument that it will tip soon or has already tipped, though.
I agree, at the edges, this obviously breaks down, so some shared set of values is needed. If a significant portion of the country considers things like "governance," "democracy," "peace," "stability," "survival," as having negative value, tolerating them becomes quite difficult in a democratic republic like the US. This is why the left's crusade against free speech or just generally tolerating honest discussions is so concerning. That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle. It's when they break that that it becomes justifiable to not tolerate them. But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
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I’m not sure if I should be pleasantly surprised or deeply alarmed that I’m fully in agreement with you on this.
Recognizing the nature of the problem is the first step to finding a solution.
Reply above is filtered, btw.
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But humans need words to communicate -- and apparently so do other rational agents. It's nearly imposible to talk about empathy, mass formation psychosis, rent-seeking, woke ideology, frequency illusion, etc. without using these words.
That doesn't depend on either freedom of speech or Open Ideas.
That sounds like a non-answer, but it helps narrow your opinion down a lot: Your idea of Freedom of Speech and Open Ideas is constrained to a narrow field (everywhere except interpersonal relationships?). I've seen it linked to fully-general ideas of tolerance and non-judgment before, which do apply to things as simple as friendships.
No. I believe Open Ideas / Freedom of speech applies to interpersonal relationships as well.
But the reason why you decide to distance yourself from a person matters. If the reason why you personally decided to distance yourself is because you personally find some of his/her views detestable, that's a personal choice. But if the reason is that the tyranny of the majority has decreed that's what everyone should do, that's entirely different.
The key factor is not whether or not you distance yourself. It's what are the consequences for society.
If you make your decision based on personal criteria, it's likely there will be no repercussions to society. But you make it based on societal decrees, it's very likely that other people would do the same, and that would almost certainly blow back on society.
So basically if a social ostracism decision has a potential to affect society, freedom of speech has something to say about it.
This sounds a lot like "any snow flake is free to slide down the mountain, it is the avalanches that are the problem".
Suppose there is a baker who runs an "Aryan Bakery" with a swastika in the logo, which is something which is very permissible from a freedom of speech point of view.
A lot of potential customers would make the personal choice not to do business with him, because they find Nazis repugnant. Most of these people would probably also unfriend anyone whom they saw using a branded bag from that place, which admittedly is a more concerning indirect effect, but imho still fair.
Overton windows are a feature of basically all societies. Liberal societies generally limit the repercussions for speech acts, e.g. they will mostly not put you in jail for speech unless you are directly inciting violence. But unless you are already on the outermost edges of society, it is likely that speech acts outside the Overton window will have some repercussions for you.
This is not always ideal. I am sure that there are good ideas whose adoption took and continues to take longer because most people who had them knew that they were icky ideas, and a significant fraction of their society would consider them a bad person if they voiced them publicly. Atheism, gay rights and embryo selection would all be such examples, from where I stand.
Still, this is unavoidable. There are a lot of sellers in the marketplace of ideas, so that no person can carefully examine all the ideas every vendor has on offer. So people need some heuristics. And one such heuristic is "if someone promotes what seems to be a terrible idea, you should adjust your estimate of their average idea quality downwards."
Snow flakes are not susceptible to social contagion.
By making that claim you are proving my point.
An Aryan Bakery has nothing to do with Open Ideas, because there's no idea being expressed or defended.
Therefore it has nothing to do with the reasoning behind freedom of speech, which was all about ideas that could potentially benefit society.
The fact that you believe an Aryan Bakery has anything to do with actual freedom of speech shows the need for Open Ideas.
Contrary to common belief, freedom of speech does not only apply lengthy substack articles explaining ideas in great detail, but also to symbolic acts which show support of an idea, such as flying symbols or flags, or burning them.
This is a load-bearing feature of free speech. A society where people could only academically discuss ideas but not establish common knowledge about certain ideas being popular would not be a free society.
In the Western world, the meaning of the swastika is rather well established. It is a handle attached to a certain ideology with well established ideas. I see very little difference between our baker putting the swastika in his logo and him writing a lengthy article regurgitating Mein Kampf. I mean, with the logo, I do not learn if he blames the Jews, the Left, or the Blacks for high flour prices, but I am unlikely to find that very interesting, personally.
No it doesn't. Quote a freedom of speech thinker stating anything similar to that.
So?
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An avalanche seems very similar to to a social contagion that snowflakes are susceptible to, if we're accepting metaphors in the first place.
"Swastikas are cool" isn't an idea? "I stand with the people who use the Swastika as a symbol" isn't an idea? Where would you get the idea that abstract symbols aren't routinely freighted with meaning by humans, and thus used to communicate ideas?
How so? what's the argument?
Nobody is expressing that idea. You are making an unwarranted assumption. Inanimate objects are incapable of defending an idea, which was the whole point of freedom of speech. Not just to be able to state an idea, but be able to defend it in open debate.
How do you propose a flag can defend an idea?
Moreover, I can put a flag in my store for trolling purposes, or just as a freedom of speech prop. Why are you assuming intent from inanimate objects?
Most of human communication operates through these sorts of assumptions. Why would they be unwarranted? Are books not inanimate objects? Are letters and the written words we assemble out of them not inanimate objects? When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag? And sure, this can be abused by assuming a message that was not the signaler's actual intent... and yet, flags exist as a tool of communication because such malicious interpretation is orders of magnitude less effective than the primary signal.
If your standards of rigor are that communication should be happening with no assumptions being made either way, I'll note that no actual human communication works or has ever worked this way.
Can a book defend its ideas in open debate? I mean, sort of. It seems to me that a flag can as well. Who's invoking the message and its associations, and how?
I'm not assuming, I'm inferring. Inference is a necessary and irreducible part of human communication, which is necessarily lossy, compressed, and unreliable in the best of times.
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So I'm not allowed to have the same opinion as many other people? I'm allowed to be intolerant inasmuch as my intolerance is arbitrarily formed and odd (I hate the Beatles) but not where it's common?
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You made me curious where this came from, so I tried playing with google search date ranges and the first instance I could find that isn't a spurious result is this https://askleo.com/how_do_i_block_people_from_finding_information_about_me_on_the_internet/ which google says was written in 2008. No attribution however it seems to cite it as a well known quote already.
Interesting. I tried the same, but the earliest I could find were comments from 2010, and it's the same thing: people were already using as if it was part of the Zeitgeist, but no source.
This reminds me of cargo cults. People suddenly start repeating some dogma with zero understanding why it's there in the first place.
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Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
I don't agree with this mistake/conflict categorization, but if you are going to use it, what I'm saying that mistake theorists don't seem particularly interested in understanding what freedom of speech was supposed to be either.
It's not possible to move forward when neither side is interested in reframing freedom of speech to what it was supposed to be.
(emphasis added)
I think you're confused here.
Mistake theorists believe that everyone shares the same goals, and free speech is a useful tool for finding the best solutions. They are interested in free speech because of that.
Conflict theorists believe that various groups want to promote their own interests to the exclusion of others, and free speech is giving weapons to the enemy. They are not interested in free speech because of that.
Right, I meant mistake theorists, not conflict theorists.
In my view what Scott Alexander calls "conflict theorists" is basically woke ideology. So, yes: people who subscribe to the woke ideology don't believe in freedom of speech.
But "mistake theorists" are not significantly different: they just pretend to believe in freedom of speech.
Alexander goes on to further deconflate the categories and argues there may be "easy mistake theorists" and "hard mistake theorists". So perhaps in this framing it's only the "easy mistake theorists" the ones that pretend to believe in freedom of speech.
All I know is there's many non-woke people who pretend to care about freedom of speech, but all they do is parrot what the First Amendment says. That's not freedom of speech as it was intended.
It was written to refer to Marxists, actually.
SJ is almost definitionally conflict theorist, but white supremacists are generally conflict theorists as well. Your mistake is that you assumed "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" was isomorphic to the two sides of the culture war; it's not.
Let's look at some criteria and see how many apply to white supremacists:
So the claim that "white supremacists are generally conflict theorists" doesn't seem to hold any water.
That's definitely a claim, but you have not substantiated it.
@Eupraxia's post hit most of the relevant points, but I do also want to clarify that I chose the narrow "white supremacists are generally conflict theorists" very deliberately. The group that's been called "classical liberal HBDers" are mistake theorists, but are not white supremacists despite SJ's histrionic claims otherwise.
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...what.
I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Edit: I just realized that the above list of criteria is ripped directly from Scott's original article on conflict vs. mistake theory. While the structure of your argument makes more sense with that context, it also makes the attempt to claim white supremacists aren't conflict theorists even more farcical:
That is not true, and if even if it were, it has zero bearing on the importance of debate.
That is not an argument.
That is not an argument either.
If you are going to make the claim that white supremacists are conflict theorists, you have the burden of proof.
Personally I do not care. The only comparison between "mistake theorists" and "confllcit theorists" that matters here is in regards to freedom of speech, and I don't see any white supremacist trying trying to silence my ideas, or anyone's ideas.
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This is what I don't understand. If I'm a cynical conflict theorist who wants nothing more than to utterly crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, then I have a great motivation to become as strong as possible. In order to become as strong as possible, I need to train myself against adversity - true adversity, not a strawman adversity that just sits there while I pepper it with punches and my buddies all slap me on the back for what a badass I'm being. For that, I need both challenges to my ideas and criticism of my arguments. True challenges, true criticism, the sort that is motivated by a genuine desire to crush me and my ideas and the sort that actually has a real chance of changing my mind (this, of course, requires me to keep an open mind - so as to better improve myself to better crush my enemies and erase them from history).
I don't see how one accomplishes this without free speech. Without critics feeling free to yell their most malicious criticisms towards me without a single fear of consequence, I can't trust that my ideas or I have been properly tested, and so I have less confidence in my ability to crush my enemies, and I'm more vulnerable to being crushed by my enemies instead. I don't want that. So I want free speech.
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, your ideas bring true can (from this perspective) be a significant disadvantage because you cannot dress them up as prettily or make them as appealing as someone whose ideas are all lies.
Indeed, and the immediate obvious question this raises is, "Did this idea propagate to me because it has an advantage in the realm of ideas, or because it has an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas?" I could embrace hubris, declare that I'm the one who won't get zombified if bit, the one where when I complain that the umpire's strike zone is too big when my favorite baseball team is on offense, it's because the ump's zone really is too big, the one that can truly reliably judge this idea as "better," not merely "better at propagating itself." In which case, I suppose just shutting down all opposing opinions and enforcing it with an iron fist seems like a pretty attractive solution. Of course, there's the issue that the idea that this is a viable solution could have propagated to me because it's good at propagating itself, even if it isn't actually good. And if I'm wrong on that, then my attempts to crush my enemies could be disastrous. So I'm cynically motivated to open up this idea to criticism, so as to tear away its weaknesses, harden its strengths, and make it more capable of crushing my enemies when implemented.
But also, if I decide that it matters to me that the ideas that I propagate are actually ideas that are better, not merely ones that were better at convincing me, then I should open up these ideas to quite a lot of criticism, certainly at least within the ballpark of what I would judge as "too much," because the fact that I already believe these ideas means that I can't be relied on not to underestimate how much criticism is warranted.
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This might make sense if you have an advantage or think you have an advantage in the realm of ideas. But if you have an advantage in terms of smashing skulls or coordinating other people to smash skulls then I don't think it makes sense.
Correct. So those who are against free speech on the basis of conflict theory are openly admitting that they don't believe that they have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And people are absolutely allowed to believe, "My ideas are bad, but it should win over the good ideas anyway, and I will make it so through smashing the skulls of the proponents of the good ideas." But I don't think that's something they actually believe. I think they actually believe that their ideas are good, i.e. have an advantage in the realm of ideas. And I think their behavior indicates that they're deathly insecure about this belief and are deathly fearful of what might happen if someone checks.
Not so simple. It's pretty trivial to come up with justifications why my ideas are good but not immediately obvious. For example, I believe my ideas tend to be good in the lonf term, but inferior ideas are more appealing in the short term, and that there's a lot of people with high time preference. A progressive, on the other hand, might believe that someone's bigotry might prevent them from trying something, but once they do, it turns out to be not so bad (see for example "but have you considered the Irish" arguments when immigration is brought up).
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Relabeling it won't work, they will attack "Open Ideas" just as easily.
Yes, but they can't just use a slogan for "freedom of speech", they would have to justify their position, which they can't.
Moreover, true freedom of speech actually welcomes attacks. The whole point is that if you are on the side of truth you should be able to deflect them easily.
It's unclear why you think they wouldn't be able to use a slogan. I feel like rebranding to "Open Ideas" will take significantly more effort than for an empty dismissal slogan countering it to spread. "Open Ideas doesn't mean Hate Speech" or whatever sticks.
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I agree. Freedom of speech hasn't been poisoned; people don't believe in it any longer. What you call it doesn't make much difference unless you can persuade people that the idea is still valuable.
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Some people seem to equate “freedom of speech” with “freedom of reach”. You can say whatever you want. That doesn’t mean what whatever you say must be published by loudspeaker media institutions and promoted by social media algorithms.
If social media algorithms are made to filter certain ideas, you have censorship. And that's not how the algorithms are meant to be used in the first place. Algorithms are supposed to personalize your feed so that content you're interested in is shown to you. The argument you're using here is often used to promote censorship, and it's often combined with the argument "Freedom of speech is only a protection against government censorship", and here I'd say the same thing as OP - that it's a poisoned version of the actual concept, and poorly thought out.
Of course, this leaves some ambiguity in the definition of free speech, but I think those can be fixed if we borrow the concept of positive vs negative rights
This is obviously wishful thinking. We don’t own the algorithms. The tech companies that own the platforms own the algorithms. Companies operate in service of shareholder value. Therefore algorithms are constructed for the set of events, circumstances and behaviours that creates most shareholder value. Definitely not for you or me, no matter how many “For You” tabs you see.
The point stands. You can say whatever you want. No media / social media company is obliged to take that and bring it to one or a hundred or a million other people.
Also – and this is the most important point of all - having the freedom to say whatever you want is good, because you might win someone (or a whole society) over to your way of thinking. But if the opposite happens, and someone or society decides you’re a crackpot and they don’t want to hear from you ever again, that’s okay too. The one who listens has as much freedom as the one who speaks.
I think you're missing the point. If you wanted to talk to your mother, would I be okay with deciding what you were allowed to say? Would Google? The government? As far as I'm concerned, nobody has the right to hinder communication between anyone else. The fact that Google can even read my emails is already a disaster, and I'm quite sure reading your physical mail is highly illegal, and that the reasons behind this decision aren't invalid for digital mails.
This sounds like the freedom of association? I like that concept. What I dislike is when companies try to decide who I can associate with, as well as who can associate with me.
The internet didn't work like this before the fallacy of association began. The form of the fallacy is "If illegal content ends up on Google, Google is guilty" or "If a person writes a slur in your game chat, your game is guilty", "If you're friends with a sexist, you're likely a sexist yourself", etc. You might have heard other versions of it, like "Roblox is guilty because pedophiles use it" and "Guns should be illegal because criminals use them". The idea is sometimes mocked as "Hitler drank water once, therefore you're a nazi for enjoying water". I believe that a large chunk of all conflict in the world, and the biggest reason that ideological bubbles have become such a problem, is this very fallacy.
No I’m not missing the point. The freedom of speech people are not talking about you talking to your mother. They’re talking about being throttled or “censored” so their content doesn’t go as far as they would like it to.
You been to London? There’s a place called Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. I can go there, get up on a wooden box, and speak about whatever I want. If what I’m saying is well constructed and delivered, a small crowd will inevitably gather round. If not, or I’m crazy, no one will listen to me.
It seems like a ridiculous analogy, but the freedom of speech brigade think Hyde Park should usher in a hundred people and encourage them to stand there and listen to me.
In London, random people will decide if you're worth listening to or not. On social media sites, random people will never get to decide if the algorithm simply blacklists things containing words which align with specific ideologies. The algorithm doesn't even know who I am, nor has the algorithm learned that people do not want to hear what I'm saying, it's simply manually coded to prevent people from talking about certain ideas, even between people who both like said idea.
The mechanism you're describing is an algorithm which favors the content that people enjoy the most, and filters away the content that people enjoy this least, but this is not how social media algorithms work. If a website implements a neutral algorithm, and simply step back and let things take care of themselves, then they'll get in big trouble. Maybe porn will be on the frontpage, maybe one of Hitlers speeches will blow up because it's interesting, maybe bots will successfully game it, whatever. Every algorithm which exists today is carefully engineered to do specific things, and it's not true that your online following is a function of the ratio of people who want to associate with you and hear your ideas. They manually "correct" it every time content that the owners don't like become popular. I'd not dislike such an algorithm much, as it would technically be fair for all users
But
in order to get your idea in front of other people who might line your idea, it has to distribute your message to a proportion of available people who might like it. My point is, this distribution, if it happens, is a bonus. You, or nobody, is entitled to this distribution. People who complain that their reach is getting throttled are complaining that they’re not getting wider distribution, and then complain that their freedom of speech is getting unlawfully restricted. It’s not, because they are not entitled to that distribution in the first place.
The difference between talking outside and online, is that real spaces aren't moderated or owner by other people. The supermarket cannot stop other people from hearing your voice, your local park cannot make you invisible to other people. Your destribution is only hindered by the laws of physics. Imagine if, in real life, you were told "You aren't entitled to use the sidewalk", or "If nobody lets you use your local bridge, maybe you should reflect on your behaviour", or perhaps "Your local water company can refuse to sell you water if your political views do not align with theirs". This is the important difference, which it feels like you're brushing over or not noticing
I’m not brushing over it or not noticing. You’re making completely false equivalencies between publicly owned and privately owned.
Now you might argue that X or YouTube etc should be publicly owned (I.e. commandeered by the state). But thats a completely different argument.
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If you gave a speech in the liquor isle about the dangers of alcohol, you’d be removed. You’ll also be removed for causing a disturbance. It happens all the time. Homeless people yelling at the voices in their head get kicked out quite often.
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But if, to take an extreme example, I lock you in a soundproof box in the basement of a castle for spreading incendiary rumours, it seems very peculiar to say, ‘no, you have free speech, I’m just not helping you distribute that speech to others’. I think we agree on that much.
To take a less extreme example, if there are two speakers on Speakers Corner, and I give a giant megaphone to the other one that totally drowns out your voice, that doesn’t exactly seem like free and fair speech either.
In actual real life, there is some level of ‘not helping you distribute your ideas’ that is equivalent to ‘shutting you up’.
It doesn’t maybe mean you have to give big megaphones to everyone, but maybe you do have to give them all a soundproof room and make it known where they are and direct people on request and not actively direct them away.
I think the soundproof room in a dungeon is another false equivalency. But for the sake of a civil argument let’s agree on the loudspeaker question. Do we actually think some people are getting a helping hand through a shiny new loudspeaker, with the twin express aims of promoting their ideas and drowning out ideas someone doesn’t like? Or is it just the case that people whose ideas get more reach have skilfully figured out the content algorithm game?
Personally I think that it’s convenient for some people to claim that they’re being throttled by some nefarious group of actors, rather than build the skills necessary to be more successful in the algorithm.
I think the second reality is much more likely, but that turns down the dial on conspiratorial thinking. Messy reality is scarier than a perception of victimhood, which appeals because it moves the locus of control away from you and me.
TLDR - it’s more attractive for us to believe our freedom of speech is being limited by bad actors than accept that we’re not skilled enough or our ideas aren’t very good.
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This is a straw man, because nobody is saying anything remotely close to that.
If I say something controversial about COVID-19, freedom of speech would dictate that I shouldn't be banned from Facebook for it. That not "freedom of reach", that's "let my friends and family who have accepted me read what I wrote".
Same thing on YouTube, reddit, X/Twitter, and so on. My followers follow me for a reason.
But more importantly: why should I be fired from my job because of something I posted on social media? This has nothing to do with "freedom of reach", this is punishing people for challenging established dogma.
Agree with this, for sure. When I say “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach”, I don’t at all mean you should be thrown off the platform. What I do mean is the platform has no obligation to algorithmically promote what you say to other people on the internet.
The people who follow you is an interesting question, and a much thornier one for Internet user preferences.
There’s too much content, and we “follow” too many accounts, for reverse-chronological content to work. If it ever worked, it certainly cannot work now, with AI helping everyone pump out 10x to 100x more content and content variations than before. So there’s just too much. Some sorting algorithm is required but…
I hate the algorithms. They act like crack and plug me in intravenously (figuratively speaking) to the brain-rotting content I can’t stop myself from consuming. I know I am better off without the algorithms (as they’ve evolved in 2022-25). In 2016-21, the algorithms brought me interesting, heterodox ideas and content, and I was psychologically and epistemologically better off as a result. That has flipped since 2022 on almost every platform. (YouTube seems to be an exception.)
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Why put so much effort into pretending you're not exercising power?
Megaphone media has the excuse of limited resources, but SocMeds have no justification for manipulating the kind of content their users will see. Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm, but at the very least people should be given the option to switch to a basic "people who liked X also liked Y" algorithm.
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
Firefox released a patch to fix a sandbox escape* just a few days ago. Properly sandboxing a program has not been solved; it is an active problem that consumes a lot of developer time and current solutions likely still have many holes to be found.
Crooks mostly rely on users downloading and running scripts because it's easy and it works. Writing exploits against browsers isn't worth the effort when you can socially engineer people and get the same results.
Most sandboxing is also bad for performance. Javascript on a random webpage generally doesn't need to perform well but a recommendation algorithm will.
Any cut-off aggressive enough to meaningfully restrict denial-of-service attacks would make algorithm-writing functionally impossible for the majority of users and probably also prevent most of the possible algorithms people would like to write.
* I can't see the bug report but based on the reported severity this appears to be a between-page sandbox escape rather than fully leaving the browser.
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I agree. And surely it can’t be far away from legislation that forces tech platforms to give users control over (or at least MUCH more transparency about) the algorithm used.
It’s impossible to consider that the tech cos will do this themselves. They would be slaughtering the greatest golden goose that ever was. Their hand must be forced.
Yup, that or nationalize them outright, or provide a public platform.
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Ultimately, I think it comes down to not allowing social media to have their cake and eat it too. It's perfectly valid of them to only allow what they want to allow on their platform. But then you cannot claim that you are unable to block content you can be liable for.
if your algo is making opinionated editorial decisions, you are fully responsible for what it shows as a publisher. If it's only making technical editorial decisions or no editorial decisions, then you can enjoy the protections that currently exist. I think it's the only way to thread the needle between freedom of association and freedom of speech.
I deactivated twitter/x a few months ago. Got tempted back in last week and went through the ordeal of solving 10 visual puzzles (weirdly cryptic and very difficult) to prove I was human. Within three minutes, and WITHOUT A SINGLE POINT OF PREFERENCE FROM ME (no likes, no comments, no follows…) I was being shown loathsome racist material. Somebody somewhere wants this to happen, and set it up precisely this way. The base algorithm of X is racist, bigoted, hateful, angry and divisive, and it’s radicalizing people’s opinions every second of every day. And I say this as someone who thought Jack’s original app, from ~2010 and right up to the way it introduced dissenting voices during COVID-19, provided an indispensable service to humanity. There was obvious censorship and bias that Elon set out to fix. But he’s made it 100 times worse in the opposite direction.
I'm not seeing how this particular belief would increase your credibility on the issue.
Bad phrasing. Basically:
This has been ongoing for far longer than that. Tristan Harris's TED talk outlining how he as a google employee explicitly aimed to manipulate you to maximize your "Time On Site", came out in 2016, and his original internal talk on the subject dates back to 2013.
A few additional data points:
Zvi Mowshovitz published his delenda est post on the Facebook algorithm in 2017. So the situation was bad enough to provoke a generally mild-mannered New York Jewish quant into making a public delenda est post by then.
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Fair points. My point is it’s got a lot LOT worse since ~2021/22. This was absolutely influenced by TikTok’s algorithm which meant it didn’t matter who you followed, they were giving you what your behaviour told it you wanted. The others followed suit and the consequences are / will be disastrous.
I largely agree with you. I think the difference is probably (and we may never know for sure) what are they optimizing for now more than how they are going about it.
I think 2015/2016 social media companies were really optimizing for maximizing the attention as their one true goal. Whereas by the time we were deep in the covid years, they were seeking to metacognitively reflect their understanding of you back to you, while continuing to optimize for attention.
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