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"Marketplace of Ideas"?

Cavemonster said:
To avoid derailing the other thread, I've copied my response to Skeptic Tank here.

Anyone wanting to discuss what I posted, please do so here.
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Ok so here's my question again: how do you ensure that limits on unwanted speech don't come back to bite you in the ass?

Like, now you get to decide which speech is allowed, but what happens when your neighbor gets the stick?
 
BobTheCoward said:
I'm surprised you think recognizing ideas are not objectively good or bad is throwing one's hands up.
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Objective is a high bar.

Societies hold values. There exist zero societies without values and rules in play based on those values. Values are inherently subjective.
 
Belz... said:
Ok so here's my question again: how do you ensure that limits on unwanted speech don't come back to bite you in the ass?

Like, now you get to decide which speech is allowed, but what happens when your neighbor gets the stick?
Click to expand...

Well we all agree on what is a good idea, so it is just a matter of making sure people with the stick agree that only good ideas are up for discussion.
 
Cavemonster said:
Objective is a high bar.

Societies hold values. There exist zero societies without values and rules in play based on those values. Values are inherently subjective.
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Going back to original post, that means in Nazi society, Nazi ideas are the good ideas, and non fascist ideas do not need to be debated over and over again.
 
Cavemonster said:
The part I have a problem with is the underlying assumption that worthwhile ideas will do well in debate and dumb and destructive ideas won't.

Public debate, the popularity and spread of ideas has little to do with logic and more to do with effective rhetoric, emotional attachments etc.

The "market" value of ideas has a very loose relation to factual truth, moral goodness or levels of help or harm.
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Sounds like you are about to give up on democracy and opt for an ‘enlightened despotism ‘.

I say, we have a bit of faith in our citizenry and keep fighting the good fight. We may never have a final victory but we can win many battles and keep advancing.
 
Look we can all agree that no one who matters ever was harmed by nazis radicalizing on the internet. Right?
 
One problem is who gets to decide which ideas are to be prohibited and not allowed into the 'marketplace' of ideas. Another is determining how these ideas will be prohibited. Sometimes, the solution is worse than the problem it was supposed to solve. I think this is one of those cases.

Let the nazis, white supremacists, flat earthers, truthers, and fans of the Chicago Bears express their opinions just like the rest of us.
 
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Belz... said:
Ok so here's my question again: how do you ensure that limits on unwanted speech don't come back to bite you in the ass?

Like, now you get to decide which speech is allowed, but what happens when your neighbor gets the stick?
Click to expand...

We can't ensure that. whether we're talking about government censorship or facebook's latest policy. And that's a problem. But we should look at those risks as a realistic balance sheet rather than a deal breaker.

And let me clarify that I'm not even necessarily talking about government enforced censorship. I'm more saying that a faith in the marketplace of ideas and the sanctity of free speech shouldn't stop us from realistically looking at the pros and cons of how we deal with speech in lots of settings, including the rules of online message boards.

When electricity was rising in popularity, opponents of the new technology came forward with some serious risks. It could burn down a house! People could be electrocuted! etc etc. All of their risks were real, but we find that we prefer living with electricity and all that it makes possible and living with some level of those risks.

So let's look realistically at the risks of abuse of limits on speech.

For one thing, I don't think speech is really that different from other actions.

We limit people's motion in a million ways from jaywalking laws to private property protections. We limit the things you can own- you can't have a nuclear bomb or a million species of wild animals. We limit what you can build- you can't build a house that doesn't meet regulations etc etc etc.

And yet, we're not that concerned that allowing the general principles of regulation in all those areas is such a slippery slope that we'd better not go there at all.

And really we're not entirely virginal on limiting speech. We've had obscenity laws forever. We have laws about truth in advertising (and that often difficult concept of "truth" can be it's own slippery slope). We have defamation law. We consider some utterances harrassment or threats.

And we don't have to look to dystopian counterfactuals to imagine what might happen with stricter speech controls than we have in the US. Germany makes it illegal to deny the Holocaust or praise Hitler. The UK has has stricter regulation of speech on a number of grounds. Both have had such policies for a while and haven't become apocalyptic hellholes. They may have some government action that some people here don't like, but they haven't slid down those slopes yet. They may not really be so slippery.

To some people, free speech is an end in itself. I don't hold that value, I don't think free speech is much different than freedom of movement. If we can handle crosswalks and traffic laws, we can probably survive making it uncool to be a Nazi.
 
Giz said:
Sounds like you are about to give up on democracy and opt for an ‘enlightened despotism ‘.

I say, we have a bit of faith in our citizenry and keep fighting the good fight. We may never have a final victory but we can win many battles and keep advancing.
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Should the government be able to regulate what tobacco companies say about their products?
 
Sometimes there are monsters in the room.

The monsters don't get any bigger if you turn on the lights.

But once you do, you can see what you're dealing with, and decide how you want to handle it.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Going back to original post, that means in Nazi society, Nazi ideas are the good ideas, and non fascist ideas do not need to be debated over and over again.
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You're right, there's no such thing as a good idea! Let's throw our hands up and never discuss the value or impact of ideas again!

You go first.
 
Cavemonster said:
And let me clarify that I'm not even necessarily talking about government enforced censorship. I'm more saying that a faith in the marketplace of ideas and the sanctity of free speech shouldn't stop us from realistically looking at the pros and cons of how we deal with speech in lots of settings, including the rules of online message boards.

When electricity was rising in popularity, opponents of the new technology came forward with some serious risks. It could burn down a house! People could be electrocuted! etc etc. All of their risks were real, but we find that we prefer living with electricity and all that it makes possible and living with some level of those risks.

So let's look realistically at the risks of abuse of limits on speech.

For one thing, I don't think speech is really that different from other actions.
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If we exclude that, then there isn't really a marketplace of ideas.You could say this place, but nothing we do here will ever matter. People are not going out and engaging with different views. Humans interact with their circle, it is probably like minded, and they are engaging with ideas that already survived your values criteria.
 
DragonLady said:
Sometimes there are monsters in the room.

The monsters don't get any bigger if you turn on the lights.

But once you do, you can see what you're dealing with, and decide how you want to handle it.
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Metaphors aside, social media and online discussion are powerful recruiting tools for violent extremists. And normalizing their core ideas in slightly less extreme spaces are part of that process.

The recent New Zealand shooter got a lot of his talking points on 8chan. (EDIT: I believe. It may have been another chan or chan related site)

If by turning on the lights, you mean to make the distinction between allowing public discussion and disallowing it, I think a strong argument can be made that turning on the lights CAN make the monsters bigger.
 
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DragonLady said:
Sometimes there are monsters in the room.

The monsters don't get any bigger if you turn on the lights.

But once you do, you can see what you're dealing with, and decide how you want to handle it.
Click to expand...

The thing is that these networks really do make people into bigger nazis and push them to violence. Remember how the OK hand gesture was supposed to be some big joke about fooling people into thinking you are a nazi? Then the guy who just murdered 50 people is doing it. Clearly this means he is not a nazi and was really just a troll killing those people for the LOLZ! Totally changes everything when you understand that.
 
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