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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.
I've never heard of even opponents of free speech claiming that we have to get rid of it because people will believe in printing money.
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