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A clear and very delightful essay from Wayward Axolotl in 2017 on free speech being a means toward the unalloyed good “social rationality”:
This got me thinking about Google, which is in a round of layoffs of thousands of employees. I find myself thinking conspiratorially: this would be a great time for them to purge all remaining wrongthinkers from their midst, possibly using their AI to pick those who hold such “hateful” ideas as James Damore.
I have no evidence at all, nor have I heard of such a thing happening. The thought was partly inspired by the military having a similar purge under Obama and now Biden, such that the top generals and admirals are reported (on rightward and far right media alike) to be fully “globohomo” at this point.
Those of you in Silicon Valley or STE(A)M professions, do you know anyone recently laid off from Alphabet, and what their views are?
Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
If we could somehow ensure that the people doing the censoring had correctly learned the lessons of history that other people had failed to learn then this would be great. But ensuring that is about as hard an just ensuring that we all collectively remember those lessons in the first place.
I see an ambiguity in the notion of learning the lesson of history.
One version involves people poring over the history. Doing X didn't work last time. It didn't work the time before either. People make adjustments, informed by the past. They do X version 3. It doesn't work. Merde! Some commentators claim that the adjustments were silly and stood no chance of making a difference to the outcome. People knew the history and did X anyway because they don't learn from history.
An alternative version involves people ignoring the history. A few point out that X didn't work last time. One more knowledgeable person points out that it didn't work the time before that either. The naysayers get told "this time is different". The people saying "this time is different" know nothing of last time and know of no difference between this time and last time. But they want to do X and "this time is different" are the magic words that let you do X. They repeat X version 1 and it fails the same way it failed the previous two times.
I believe in both versions. Sometimes there is a real, but unsuccessful effort to learn from history. We say that people didn't learn from history, because we judge by results. But there was an honest effort. I see no reason to censor such efforts. Other times, only a few people study the history. They are unanimous: don't do it! But they get out voted, and X gets done with foreseeable bad results. If you were paying attention, you notice that the bad results were actually foreseen. We would be much better off if we censored those saying "We should do X. This time is different."
Well, that is my claim. I don't think it fails because it is hard to learn the correct lesson from history. I think that there are cases were a policy doesn't work in theory, doesn't work in practice, and those in the know, know. There are low hanging fruit, ripe for plucking. Society screws up because people ignore the history because they don't care.
But is my claim true? I think that the weakest point is that the power to censor is a power honey pot that will attract a lot of wasps. I'm talking of technocrats carefully selecting the low hanging fruit. But society is run by chancers and grifters who don't care whether the fruit hangs low or is ripe. They want power. They want money. If there is an Office of Censorship, they will fight to control it, planning to censor any-one who blocks their route to power and money. I don't know what to do with this insight. It proves too much. If I take it seriously I end up an anarchist and reject government and power structures entirely.
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