It always starts like that. People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. Eventually the definition of hate or whatever it is that’s offensive is very removed from the original meaning, and now we all bear the brunt of the sensible people who with best intentions wanted to make things better.
Hanlon's razor has hobbled everyone's ability to see what the establishment is doing. This isn't about good intentions gone wrong. The loss of control of the narrative due to the internet has been a severe setback for the powerful, and they have been slowly clawing it back by limiting access to alternative media.
Various think tanks, NGOs, board members with multiple irons in the fire, foreign interests, and the government itself exert a lot of influence on large players to shut down harmful narratives. Most visible was when the deplatforming activity started with threats from lawmakers against outlets if they didn't remove certain content. You've also got various orgs with CIA connections acting as "fact checkers" on Facebook. The influence happens in subtle and many ways.
"threats from lawmakers against outlets if they didn't remove certain content." Could you be more specific what that certain content was?
Suspected Russian bots, Alex Jones, Covid misinfo, then there's this sort of thing:
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/03/my-life-as-a-new-york-ti...
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-...
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1097834759181553664?s=...
https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the...
>The loss of control of the narrative due to the internet has been a severe setback for the powerful
How was the narrative controlled by the powerful before the internet became a part of everyday life? Specifically, how was the narrative controlled in the US in the decades before 1993?
I'm asking for recommendations of books written by historians, journalists and other serious people. (Understanding the situation decades ago is probably a lot easier than understanding the current situation -- partly because the powerful will take pains to hide their controlling actions from the public.)
In the US I get the general sense that politicians and holders of government offices have never been able to exert a lot of control of the narrative with the result that journalists and the prestigious universities have so much influence that they are best thought of as essentially part of the government.
That suggests that the efforts of the establishment to rein in the big social media companies will prove largely ineffective with the result that Facebook and Google will probably join the New York Times and Harvard as parts of the de facto governing structure of the US.
EDITED: changed "rein" to "rein in".
If that is true then that suggests that the efforts of the establishment to rein the big social media companies will prove largely ineffective with the result that Facebook, Google, etc, will probably join the New York Times, Harvard, etc, as part of the governing structure of the US.
That's exactly what "reining in" looks like. Instead of being an alternative to, e.g. the New York Times and opposing the next Iraq war, social media just becomes yet another rah-rah cheerleading mouthpiece of whatever opinion the "serious people" hold.
I don't know if you consider Chomsky to be a "serious person", but Manufacturing Consent does go into how the people actually in charge of the government (professional civil servants, corporate lobbyists, etc) manage to make it seem as if their opinions are infallibly correct and countervailing opinions are thinly veiled crankery. What social media did (at least in its early days) was give everyone the ability to manufacture consent at a scale that previously was only the domain of the large media corporations. The establishment media is obviously threatened by this and are working to ensure that the new media follows the same guidelines as the old, even if that means censorship.
Of course, that's not how the establishment media phrases it (and probably not even how they believe it). They see it as "protecting" the people from unsavory "Russian fake news". In reality, though, that's just a lie they tell themselves and tell us to justify their continued hold on the ability to decide which opinions can be held by "right-thinking people". If they were truly interested in "the marketplace of ideas", they wouldn't be pushing so hard to make platforms as centralized, controllable and censorship friendly as they are.
Manufacturing consent online is dependent on the rules of the game. Russian-bot-syndrome is a fraud issue, in this case a state actor manipulating the 1-person-1-voice assumption of the game. If we're making a marketplace metaphor, then this market is being tilted toward actors with the resources to pay for bots, workers, or influencers. It's not like it's limited to Russia; Bloomberg was somewhat showy during the primary about paying people to tweet for him, and it's safe to assume any other well-resourced actor with an interest in manufacturing consent is doing the same thing.
The censorship debate is an indicator of game-rule collapse in social media. The platforms are reaching for top down control because they can't cook up a better way to reduce fraud and (let's call it) low-quality behavior. Ironically this method reduces the overall authenticity of the platforms and counteracts the intent of the censorship, and thus you get game-rule collapse.
> Bloomberg was somewhat showy during the primary about paying people to tweet for him
I'm genuinely curious, do you have any more details or sources on this?
This is what my googling pulled up, which matches my memory of it: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-23...
It was an interesting situation because in some ways, I prefer the transparency involved? But it's sort of like any sale of an account, even if temporary - it seems disingenuous by nature. Almost like how an MLM makes you sell to your friends.
Has anyone demonstrated how many people these "Russian bots" have influenced? There's enough craziness online before throwing in non-linear warfare. I'd imagine it's far less influence than, say, Charles Koch has. Why is it ok that he has an outsized influence on our "democracy" but such a terrible thought that Putin has influence? It's not like either person will act in our collective interest.
It's connected to the same reason we only allow US citizens to be involved in US politics. You at least assume that a citizen has a direct interest in the country's domestic well-being. We talk about russian bots nationally because violating that norm is a cultural scandal, but there's plenty of discussion around outsize influence by corporations and the rich in social media as well. It's not really okay for anybody.
Anyone who assumes that Charles Koch is acting in our collective interest is beyond nuts. Regardless, I appreciate the hand-holding explanation here.
TL;DR: You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
The go-to text is Manufacturing Consent.
By the publishers of newspapers. The winter soldier hearings as essentially a mass confessional of war crimes witnessed and participated in during Vietnam flat out weren't covered at all on the East Coast for one.
I really don't get that logic. Of course, everyone agrees that hate speech is bad (and so are a lot of things, but I digress). But how is it not censorship when one of the world's most powerful companies does it? Do they get a free pass because they are governed by shareholders and make a lot of money? I can see how it's not censorship if Bob does not want people to post things he disagrees with on his cat picture forum with 200 users. When a few massive companies effectively control the possibility of reaching 95ish% of the audience on the Internet, it's censorship in the very worst sense of the word, and I don't see how it's possible to support it without being an unequivocal opponent of free speech.
It's a question of what is meant by the term censorship. In the strictest sense, moderation and censorship are very often the same thing. If for instance, I post something terrible in a comment on here, and the administration of HN deletes that comment, then that's censorship.
However, when most people talk about censorship they're using it not in the strict sense, but rather as a shorthand for someone violating their first amendment right. In this case this is really only a crime when it's a government entity doing it, although people don't typically differentiate between the government and any large organization, which technically are legally allowed to censor you on their platform or property.
There's a larger discussion that needs to happen with regards to censorship. There are two extremes at play here, on the one hand there's the absolute freedom stance of literally nothing censored (only example I can think of for this is maybe the dark web, but really everyone censors if only a little), even shouting fire in a crowded theater or posting child pornography. On the other extreme is the absolute censorship of someplace like China, where only permitted thoughts and expressions can be posted. The US and most of the rest of the world tends to fall somewhere in the middle.
The big struggle right now is that everyone has recognized that there's clearly some kind of problem. We're seeing unprecedented levels of misinformation, and a frankly weaponization of social media both for profit, and for international politics. I don't know that anyone has a good solution for how to address that problem, but the pendulum seems to be swinging towards a more censorship focused response.
> other extreme is the absolute censorship of someplace like China, where only permitted thoughts and expressions can be posted. The US and most of the rest of the world tends to fall somewhere in the middle.
It's like other countries only exist as rhetorical devices for most of HN. If you actually used the fediverse you'll see that there are plenty of Chinese users on it criticizing the state. It's the Western fediverse users being censored for wrongthink this time. Even the creator of Mastodon straight up doesn't believe in free speech wrt. to certain far right beliefs.
> everyone agrees that hate speech is bad
but does everyone agree on what hate speech is? That's the danger. You can just claim any opinion you don't like is hate speech. You can say endorsing a particular candidate is hate speech and those people can justifiably be censored; their views invalid (and in some places; justifiably killed).
It was once considered offensive, in many places a crime, to say homosexuality is morally okay or that the Bible should be translated into German and English or to say God doesn't exist.
There is no distinction between "Free speech" and "hate speech," because it requires you to qualify the former. There are exceptions in many countries, but they are for very specific things: child abuse and advocating specific violence against individuals.
Does everyone agree on what murder is? Of course not. Does that mean murder should be legal?
Well a bunch of people are running around now saying speech is violence...so in the not too distant future we might be saying someone was murdered by words.
There have always been limitations on freedom of speech, including speech that incites violence. So your example, while deliberately hyperbolic (I don't think anyone would say that words literally murder people), has always been a normal thing.
> while deliberately hyperbolic
It's not hyperbolic at all, or have you not seen the "Silence is Violence" rhetoric everywhere? It could literally come from Orwell's world of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"
The book, The Coddling of the American Mind, does a great job of showing how the goalposts for what is and isn't violent have been moved considerably in the past few years in academic circles.
Finally, violence is okay, so long as it's against the "wrong people," like the professor who was put on probation for assaulting an opposing party member with a bicycle lock, or the guy in Charlottesville who was fined $1 for assault:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/war-is-hell/#the-normaliz...
> I don't think anyone would say that words literally murder people
There are people who are literally saying that now.
> It's not hyperbolic at all, or have you not seen the "Silence is Violence" rhetoric everywhere? It could literally come from Orwell's world of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"
I’m aware of the “silence is violence” slogan. It means that inaction in the face of injustice is tacit support for the status quo. It doesn’t literally mean, for example, that all people are being violent while they are sleeping, or that people who are unable to speak are being violent. I’m sure there are some people who use the slogan in preposterous ways, but that’s true of all slogans. You’re looking into this way more than necessary. There’s a pretty clear reasonable interpretation of the slogan if you’re willing to look for that interpretation in good faith.
That interpretation is entirely too generous. That expression "Silence is Violence" is explicitly intended to compel speech and its clear meaning is that if you don't, you are contributing to the violence against minorities.
https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/129834428507983872...
This is not an extreme example. The expression has always been used (at least in the current climate) to mean, you agree with us, verbally and visibly and loudly, or we attack you.
Edit: If you think the above example is not an example of what "silence is violence" means, by all means, explain why rather than just flyby downvoting.
That example is a crowd intimidating people with the intent to compel speech, of course, and they’re using the slogan “silence is violence.” But those are two different things. You could pick any slogan you want and have a mob recite it while intimidating people into agreeing. That’s not an indictment of the slogan.
That would start the discussion of "when does an example become the standard" which I don't really want to go into. Suffice it to say I do not watch the news, I very rarely visit Twitter and do not follow anyone, and that is the only way I have ever seen that expression used - in the news, on Medium, on FB, on anywhere, when I've come across it. "Agree with us or you are violent."
I don't think there's a generous way to interpret that expression. Silence is de facto not violence. Violence requires physical action.
> Suffice it to say I do not watch the news, I very rarely visit Twitter and do not follow anyone, and that is the only way I have ever seen that expression used - in the news, on Medium, on FB, on anywhere, when I've come across it. "Agree with us or you are violent."
Have you Googled the term? Apart from the first page or so being dominated by that very recent event of the crowd intimidating people and many other people conflating that event with that slogan, you'll find plenty of articles about what it means: that choosing to not speak out about an issue helps support the status quo. In fact, I've generally seen it used to try to persuade people who don't want to support the status quo that staying quiet or trying to "not be political" is in fact supporting the status quo.
> that choosing to not speak out about an issue helps support the status quo
I mean that's just fine, and a perfectly fine point to make - and one with which in fact I agree; I have railed against police and prosecutors' offices for years, having been on the ass-end of their horror myself.
But if that's what one means to say, then say that; because the word 'violence' has a specific meaning not captured by "don't support the status quo".
This is a long way of saying I generally don't like slogans :/
That slogan specifically promotes this:
https://twitter.com/KunkleFredrick/status/129834428507983872...
and this
https://twitter.com/rawsmedia/status/1298055028213678082
It's not just a slogan. That is the actual end result of such an ideology.
Silence is not Violence. Silence is the opposite of violence. Silences is stopping, thinking, looking at all the evidence, carefully evaluating and coming up with a sound decision.
This slogan says: "Be outraged immediately without knowing any real facts about the situation"
It's literally DoubleSpeak. You are literally, right now, using DoubleThink.
Silence is not the opposite of violence. Peace is the opposite of violence.
I interpret the quote "silence is violence" to mean by not speaking out against violence, you implicitly support or contribute to it. People may disagree if this is true, but it certainly doesn't feel Orwellian.
In Germany instead of the "silence is violence" slogan people often use the famous Niemöller quote/poem but I have always understand the slogan to express the same sentiment.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
It is interesting that you say that. In English, we do use phrases like "X was destroyed by Z" ( I forget the exact idiom, but kids seem to be using it -- god I feel old ), where no actual destruction beyond verbal attack took place.
I know you were referring to something else, but it got me thinking that we are already using the phrase. Our legal system just does not allow a lot of 'word damage' to be adjudicated.
There was also “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can’t hurt me” that now seems in practice to have gone by the wayside.
I'm not gonna lie when I was a child decades ago it was well known even amongst childrens books at the time that that line's a load of horse shit. There's tons of books where that exact phrase is used to show that ignoring verbal abuse is wrong and emotionally damaging.
You don't need any levels of indirection. https://old.reddit.com/r/murderedbywords
*Note, the sub isn't interesting, I'm just demonstrating that the phrase is already in use.
>Does that mean murder should be legal?
The forms which have little agreement? Probably.
For example, some say that meat is murder. I don't think we should be outlawing meat, and thus in the eyes of the ones making such a statement, I'm supporting some forms of murder remaining legal.
But you aren't concluding, because people disagree on precisely what qualifies as "murder," that there should be no laws against murder. That is the argument proposed in the earlier comment about why there should not be laws against hate speech.
No, there's a set of statutes that lay out what murder looks like, and ultimately it is up to a jury of your peers to determine if what you did satisfies the criterion. That's in fact exactly why the jury system was invented, because reasonable people can disagree, so the assumption becomes that "if a reasonable plurality of people DO agree, there's a good chance it is a good enough standard by which to act."
The subject of murder is not an appropriate analogy here, really.
Why is that not perfectly analogous? The law can describe what is and isn’t hate speech, and courts and juries can decide individual cases when necessary. This is the same for all criminal laws. The fact that not all people will agree what is and isn’t a violation of a given law at a given time is simply not a valid argument for why a given law shouldn’t exist.
Yes of course. That is, there are some things that some people call murder that should be legal.
Such as steak.
That's not the question. The question is whether there should be any laws against murder, given that people disagree on precisely what constitutes murder.
everyone agrees that hate speech is bad
The first amendment would like to differ!
Anyway it's meaningless to believe hate speech is bad, because hate speech is an undefined term. It just means something someone somewhere would like to punish someone else for saying.
Google regardless of it's size is still private, and should be allowed to host who it wants or doesn't, same as you should be forced to host visitors you dont want.
Free speech is that they shouldn't be a law by a government to punish expression of ideas or opinions.
citizens or companies should be allowed to host and not host whoever they want.
> citizens or companies should be allowed to host and not host whoever they want.
So should ISPs be allowed to not deliver a website (say Netflix's) content to you unless you pay extra?
In my opinion yes,
I wouldn't like it but it's their network, i would hope that that wouldn't be a good business decision and their competitors would not do that.
> Of course, everyone agrees that hate speech is bad
That sounds like an unjustified premise.
_Note to the casual downvoter not critically examining my argument: I am not saying that I personally do not think hate speech is bad._
> Of course, everyone agrees that hate speech is bad
As an extreme example: Do you really think the KKK believe hate speech is bad? Even if they do agree, do you think their definition looks anything like your own?
I find it hard to believe that someone who has lived through the last four years can say with a straight face that everyone agrees hate speech is bad. One would think the last US election cycle would have gone differently if that premise were true.
Do you consider is censorship if a huge Internet/media company removes illegal content like child pornography, explicit calls to "imminent lawless action," phishing/fraud attempts, explicit misinformation (like false claims that an election date has been moved), or content that goes against their own community guidelines (pornography, violence, etc.)? Do you consider those things censorship or opposition to free speech?
You're mixing up two different things: sites removing illegal content because they're mandated to do so, and sites removing legal content because they choose to do so.
Not all of the examples I gave were illegal content.
So like I said, you're mixing them up.
No, I'm not mixing them up. I'm asking questions about them to try to understand people's viewpoints.
> People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government.
We have two things to unpack here. First, hate speech. What is it? Who gets to decide what the word means and what is their procedure for deciding? Is the definition stable or fluid (or even very fluid)? Is hate speech universally wrong, or only wrong when issuing forth from certain speakers? If we all agree that it's wrong, then why are people engaging in it, even unintentionally?
Second, censorship. Is self-censorship not censorship? Why must the state be involved in order to censor? We're TV networks that for decades voluntarily forbade their programming from portraying homosexuals being censored or not? What is unique about state authority versus corporate authority as it relates to censorship?
"Hate speech is bad" is a very abstract statement. The sentence conveys almost no actual concrete meaning. It seems like a rational or sensible statement, but it delegates almost all of the actual work to feelings and emotions, and highly subjective ones at that. I don't find "wanna grab a cup of coffee" terribly hateful, but apparently some people do.
I get the overall sentiment of your post, and I think I mostly agree. Nevertheless, the way we stop this nonsense is to say at the beginning that it is an abstraction over extremely subjective feelings and emotion, and thus has no basis other than eventual mob rule authoritarianism.
> People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government.
This doesn’t seem very sensible to me, I would even say it seems to be the opposite of sensible, probably because I am not American.
hate speech is a crime in many european countries too[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_by_country
That’s a non sequitur. What do you mean “too?” What does this have to do with the claim that “it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government”?
I suspect they thought you were saying "hate speech is bad" sounds the opposite of sensible, when really you were referring to the part following the 'and'.
The is what I believe is the goal of placing restrictions on people based on “mental health”. It’s so open ended and not easily verifiable that it becomes a sliding scale.
If I'm understanding you right, the idea is that some harms, physical ones, are fair game for the law to cover, but other harms (mental ones) or a collection of boundary cases are less (if at all) within the purview of legislation.
I think there's a good conversation to be had as to what in particular makes physical harms so special as compared to others, and how existing law in every country (including the US) can constitutionally include some non-physical harms within its legislation (such as laws against sending threatening letters, or child pornography law, or fraud).
Specifically, I’m concerned about government placing restrictions on individuals based on their mental health history.
What is the process to dispute it? You can’t just take a blood test to say this isn’t really a problem.
Oh right, I don't think I understood what you were saying, then. That's also a good question.
Some problems don’t have easy simple solutions. Any answer will have some outside cases.
If a schizophrenic parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody. It is unfair. If you err on being too lenient some people will be harmed. If you err on being stringent some people will be harmed.
Complex problem cannot be solved with ideology and maxims. All solutions will fail some people sometimes.
That example seems like a easy problem to solve actually?
> If a [] parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody.
There you go, no need to place restrictions on people based on mental 'health', just their actual actions.
> what in particular makes physical harms so special
Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria.
Mental harms, and the very notion of "normality", are much more nebulous.
>Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria.
Mental harms, in many cases, can also be detected by competent professionals; besides that, it is entirely possible for physical harms to heal and for supporting evidence of their infliction be used to convict. Further, many physical harms depend at least partially on the victim's characteristics or situation; a concert pianist is arguably harmed more by someone cutting off his finger than a schoolteacher would be, for instance. Many physical harms that are rightfully legislated against often require the testimony of the victim for the case to succeed. For a wide class of 'mental harms' it is accurate to say that they are indeed physiological responses - from PTSD to lethargy and insomnia. This is in contrast to the caricature that mental harms are necessarily merely 'hurt feelings'.
I also have concerns that the difficulty or the fact of sometimes being nebulous features of mental harms should necessarily rule out such lawmaking. At best, the minimum for proving such harm should at least be set out by the legislators or judiciary, if the standard of evidence is the roadblock to legislation.
It's also worth remembering that we're talking about harms here, not mere hurts. Harms are much harder to fabricate than hurts are.
Here's where mental harms "detected by competent professionals" leads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...
It seems as though you're invoking a slippery slope fallacy; it's possible to say exactly the same about doctors working for the state who minify or trivilazize the examination of physical harm on dissidents too. The fact that expert testimony can be bought off or compelled does not preclude expert testimony from being an important consideration in general. The opioid crisis for instance has shown there are many incompetent doctors, but I doubt you'd refuse the testimony of a doctor to help your case when you are injured by someone else.
You can prove physical harm beyond a reasonable doubt. Mental harm is frequently concocted as a bullying tactic, e.g. the recent NY Times editorial controversy where employees said running an editorial they disagreed with made them "feel unsafe." https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/871817721/head-of-new-york-ti...
I don't see this as an argument against such legislation; consider that many physical crimes are also hard (or even impossible) to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, considered case-by-case. Rape very often qualifies here, as does the mens rea of various other crimes, which may rely upon testimony. Both actus reus and mens rea are required for a conviction, and while the actus reus may be easier to prove (but again, in many cases not beyond a reasonable doubt), we do not abolish the role of intention in the justice system simply because it's hard to prove.
Accusations of physical harms can also be concocted as bullying tactics too, in which the harm was suffered as a result of either a self-inflicted injury, or inflicted by somebody else. Such cases can be thrown out due to insufficient evidence. I see no reason why the same cannot be said for a subset of mental harms, in which there are equivalent doctors available to use their expertise to judge the harm.
The article you link did not mention the employees saying running the editorial made them "feel unsafe". Neither the word safe nor unsafe appears in the article. It says the article "reportedly elicited strong objections" from the staff.
Would lacking spirituality or belief in a higher existence make you mentally healthy or unhealthy?
I agree, the sliding scale only strengthens whomever is in power. In Florida, the baker act is used like this.
The persecution faced by doubters and non-believers is always surprising to me. I guess nothing should surprise me in the deep south though.
> People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government.
I'm paraphrasing what was here a few days ago:
Our banking partner is uncomfortable that the realistic sex toys modeled after magical creatures have the colors that strongly represent human organs. You will either have to change the colors or we will not be able to continue providing you with our services.
To be fair, they didn't claim that people don't also agree to very stupid and malicious things, and in fact rather implied that that's the likely result of supposedly sensible starting points.
And that's why I'm incredibly cynical about politicians and activists who use amorphous political terms like "hate speech". It eventually becomes a club wielded by whoever is making the rules of today's Calvinball game.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
I love that aphorism. Unintended consequences. We should teach unintended consequences in grade school, high school, and have advanced degrees in it. How to see them before they explode, how to mediate them, and how to fix them once they're running at full steam.
Lately I've been imagining it along with the slowly boiling frog story and the crab-mentality too. As in some people can't tell we're headed to hell because it's coming so slowly, and some people will actively stop others from escaping hell or trying to fix the situation.
There's a hypothesis I came up with awhile ago and it seems to hold pretty true. If we talk about problems as O(n) where n is the causation distance[0] we've solved the vast majority of O(1) and O(0) problems. It makes sense that biologically we would be primed to think in this way because they are decent approximate solutions for small groups. But the world we live in now is much more complex and many events are coupled and the low order approximations aren't good solutions. The problem I see is that people are treating O(5) problems like they are O(1). As a society we discuss things in this way instead of trying to understand the complexity, nuance, and coupling that exists in many of our modern problems. A good example of this is global warming. People treat it as "if we switch to renewables then we've solved global warming" when reality is substantially more complicated. But I don't know how to get people to realize problems are higher order problems and that the first order approximation isn't a reasonable solution.
[0] So O(0) means x causes itself. O(1) is y causes x. O(n) is n causes y causes ... causes x. This is just a simplified framework and not meant to be taken too seriously.
I agree, I've been thinking along these lines for a while too; thank you for phrasing it so clearly.
My current thinking led me to conclude that we don't have sufficiently good tools[0] for modelling O(n) problems with n > 2. Particularly when (what your simplification doesn't capture) there are feedback loops involved.
Take this O(2) problem: x causes more y, y causes more z, z causes less y but much more x. Or in a pictorial form:
You can't just think your way through that problem, you have to model it - estimate coefficients (even if qualitatively), account for assumptions, and simulate the dynamic behavior.
I argue that we lack both mental and technological tools to cope with this.
Speaking of global warming, a year ago I presented this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20480438 - "Will increase in coal exports of Poland increase Poland's CO₂ footprint?" Yes? No? How badly?
The question is at least this complicated:
(Presented this way it not only tells you that, ceteris paribus, it will, but roughly by how much and what are the parameters that can be tweaked to mitigate it.)
Why aren't we talking about climate change in these terms with general public? Why aren't feedback loops taught in school?
--
[0] - Or, if they exist, they aren't sufficiently well known outside some think tanks or some random academic papers.
Your ascii art is much better than mine and I'm not going to attempt it, but I agree with everything that you've said except for
> I argue that we lack both mental and technological tools to cope with this.
I do think we have the tools to solve these issues. I do not think the mental tools are in the hands of the average person (likely not even in most of your above average people because the barrier to entry is exceedingly high and trying to model any problem like this is mentally exhausting and it thus never becomes second nature). Many of the subjects broached here aren't brought up until graduate studies in STEM fields, and even then not always. An O(aleph_n) problem is intractable but clearly O(10) isn't. We should be arguing about what order approximation is "good enough" but ignoring all the problems that arises is missing a lot of fundamental problem solving. Good for a first go, but you don't stop there. I think this comes down to people not understanding the iterative process. 0) Create an idea. 1) Check for validity. 2) Attack and tear it down. 3) If something remains, rebuild and goto 2 else goto 0. I find people stop at 1 on their own ideas but jump to 2 (and don't allow for 3) for others ideas.
> Why aren't feedback loops taught in school?
I think 3 other things should be discussed as well. Dynamic problems (people often reduce things to static and try to turn positive sum games into zero sum. We could say the TeMPOraL component), probabilistic problems, and most importantly: an optimal solution does not equate to everyone being happy (or really anyone). Or to quote Picard:
> It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
The last part I think is extremely important but hard to teach.
(I should also mention that I do enjoy most of the comments you provide to HN)
> Your ascii art is much better
A skill honed in deep procrastination :).
> I think 3 other things should be discussed as well.
Strongly agreed with all three.
> Dynamic problems (people often reduce things to static and try to turn positive sum games into zero sum.
That's what I implicitly meant by talking (again and again) about feedback loops; problems with such loops are a subset of dynamic problems, and one very frequently seen in the world. But you've rightfully pointed out the superset. I think most people, like you say, try to turn everything into a static problem as soon as possible, so they can have a conclusive and time-invariant opinion on it. But it's not the proper way to think about the world[0]!
(I only disagree with the "try to turn positive sum games into zero sum"; zero-sum games also require perceiving the feedback loops involved. And then there are negative-sum games.)
> probabilistic problems
Yup. Basic probability is taught to schoolchildren, but as a toy (or just another math oddity) rather than a tool for perceiving the world.
(Thank you for the kind words :).)
--
[0] - Unless your problem has a fixed point that you can point out.
> (I only disagree with the "try to turn positive sum games into zero sum"; zero-sum games also require perceiving the feedback loops involved. And then there are negative-sum games.)
This is an often snipe I make to people talking about economics (I do agree with the lack of mention of negative sum games, but they also tend to be less common, at least in what people are about). Like the whole point of the economic game is to create new value where it didn't previously exist (tangent).
> Yup. Basic probability is taught to schoolchildren, but as a toy (or just another math oddity) rather than a tool for perceiving the world.
I think this is where we get a lot of "I'm not good at math" and "what is it useful for" discussion. Ironically everyone hates word problems, but at the heart of it that's what it is about.
Great point. Those problems are really hard to reason about, partly because without specific knowledge of the coefficients, all you can expect a well-reasoned person to conclude is that "it can go either way". And even knowing the data, most practical problems in this category would take either computer modeling or simplifying assumptions to really draw conclusions about.
Worse, someone motivated to shape the story one way or the other can create a just-so story where they emphasize only one feedback path or the other, depending on what conclusion they want their audience to draw.
I think the best antidote, although by no means a cure, is to teach clear and specific examples early on so that everyone at least can have a mental category for this class of problem, if not the tools to work through them.
Jevons paradox is a great example of one which is both clear and counterintuitive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
There's a danger of bad reasoning being involved, but I argue that "well-reasoned people" and just-so stories are problems either way. But I think that attaching a specific model to a problem grounds the conversation in reality.
Taking the carbon exports example I pasted, the model presented structurally tells you that carbon footprint is going to grow with exports. We can haggle about "how much", but - under this model - not about "whether". You can tweak the parameters to mitigate impact, you can extend the model with extra components and tweak those to cancel out the impact (and that automatically generates you reasonable solution candidates!). Or, you can flat out say that the model doesn't simplify the reality correctly, and propose an alternative one, and we can then discuss the new model.
The good thing is, at every point in the above considerations you're dealing with models and reality and somewhat strict reasoning, instead of endlessly bickering about whether A causes B or the other way around, or whether arguing A causes B is a slippery slope, or whatnot.
I strongly agree with teaching examples, both real (serious) ones and toy ones, to teach this kind of thinking.
Jevons paradox is indeed great to dig into and I suppose offer some sort of counterexample to what I'm talking about. The nature of the phenomenon is in a feedback loop, and whether it'll go good or bad depends on the parameters (the increased use can reduce the value of the intervention, cancel it out, or even make it worse than doing nothing). But from what I hear, people sometimes pick one of the possible outcomes and use it as thought stopper (e.g. "we shouldn't do X because obviously Jevons paradox will make things worse!").
> [0] - Or, if they exist, they aren't sufficiently well known outside some think tanks or some random academic papers.
Are you familiar with Judea Pearl's work regarding graphical analysis of causal problems? If not, he'd probably interest you. While he mostly falls in the category of "random academic papers" (and academic books), but he has also co-authored a very readable (and enjoyable) popular science book. A review of that book is here: http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/tim-maudlin-why-world. And a more technical overview of his graphical approach is here: https://www.timlrx.com/2018/08/09/applications-of-dags-in-ca....
I'm familiar with the name and the titles of the works (and very roughly what they're about), but I haven't read any of it yet. Thanks for the links!
Any issue about which there's a cultural movement going on can serve as a handy pretext for measures that consolidate one's own power. It kind of seems obvious to point out, but nonetheless let's continue to be open to the possibility that such consolidation is not mere coincidence, or more to the point, that the measure is not even well-intentioned and in fact has nothing do to with the ostensible issue/reason (in this case, hate speech). The most cynical of power grabs are usually cloaked in the most noble of pretenses. That's how you make the unpalatable, palatable.
>it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government
Censorship can be conducted by private institutions, governments and other controlling bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
I recently watched an excellent speech concerning freedom of speech and freedom of protest by Rowan Atkinson, and feel it's very appropriate to share here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
Censorship always starts with unpopular speech. Historically it's been raunchy porn, religious blasphemy, and direct opposition to the state. Hate speech seems to be a new one that works well to sell censorship to liberals (who should know better).
This is only "censorship" in the sense that Fox News censors me by not giving me a 5 minute slot to advocate for Medicare For All.
In reality, it's not state sponsored censorship at all, and it doesn't lead down any slippery slope.
These claims of censorship are extremely selectively applied, to only certain types of political speech. I wonder why that is?
I don't watch Fox News, but even I know that Fox invites Democrats on to talk about their opinions. Here is an interview where a BLM leader rants for 5 minutes: https://youtu.be/FTjBJiXalHU?t=59
And yet I have had my pleas for time go unanswered... which is "censorship" of me.
This is like having a bulletin board in your store and not being able to take anything down from it.
Yes, Google and Apple are big. You can say well, it’s different because in this world there’s only two boards for the entire country, that’s true! But it’s not a censorship problem, it’s an antitrust problem.
You hit the nail on the head, if they were just "more alphabets in the soup", people wouldn't have much leg to stand on; but because the internet has no analog to the actual PUBLIC square, when you have 1-3 companies that control access to what 95% of the internet sees, you have a problem - because there's no alternative and no public square on which to register your complaint.
the real problem here is that we allow google, apple or facebook to control public discourse. we let companies decide what we are allowed to talk about.
regardless of wheter we agree with what's being removed or not, this can't be healthy.
i am not american, so my interpretation may be off, but here is how i understand the problem:
many people would like hatespeech to go away. jet the US constitution prohibits government censorship, so the government can't do much about it. instead they rely on companies like google and facebook to do the work for them.
the companies are also compelled by public pressure to do what the government can't.
contrast that to germany, where hatespeech like the promotion of nazi ideas is outright illegal.
while i haven't verified this, this puts less pressure on companies to censure anything that isn't mandated by law.
public demands for the control of speech can also more easily b etranslated into law, so that the public doesn't need to resort to pressuring companies. on the contrary, they expect the government to protect them from companies that act in bad faith.
it is hard to say which system is better. if there were many small companies each making different decisions about public discourse, then things would be fine.
the problem is not so much the removal of outright hatespeech, but the more subtle influence in for example what is allowed to be posted about the covid epidemic, or other sensitive topics like political opinions, fact checking and all that.
as it stands, i prefer that decisions about what speech is allowed is controlled by law such that we can use legal means to combat abuse.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24305296)
>It always starts like that.
many places have cultures and also law that for decades has worked perfectly fine reigning in the very worst forms of hate speeech (say holocaust denial in my country) while not descending into a sort of activism that starts to get silly.
There's no automatic mechanism that turns sensible rules into insensible ones, and it's also need not be the case with sensible hate speech rules.
With cases like Google's play store the issue seems more concrete. On the one hand it's the overwhelming power and lack of due process that large firms have over software. Decentralise this and put authority into the hands of people who know their networks and the situtation will imporove. Secondly it also seems to be a very activist employee base at companies like Google that's gone somewhat overboard. Again, an accountability issue. If these things were decided publicly, it would moderate to reasonable levels.
Historic revisionism as an subgroup of hate speech is a prime example of slippery slope and moving of definition. I would add "fake news" to hate speech.
sorry I have no idea what you're trying to say. Holocaust denial is generally considered to be both historical revisionism and hate speech, the former being a tool for the latter. Is this just semantics?
Out of context is the favorite goto for most news orgs that want to push a particular set of ideals.
Ye it is semantics alright. Not taking the debate to the Holocaust, hate speech is not just incitement to hatred (quite broad) or incitement to crime (quite specific), against a group anymore. It is like "fake news", in that sense, when Trump comically turned the term against its creators.
I feel that when it comes to Google its not about if it is hate speech or not, but who controls it. I.e. Zuckerberg is fine although there are multiple long-lasting Facebook groups that have been used to incite crimes, but Aaron Swartz would not be (today). It is quite amusing how Facebook is not shut down in Europe even though many European countries would shut down any local company being so lax and arbitrary with moderation as Facebook.
"Fake News" is merely the 7% of journalists who identify as Republicans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
The problem is the political spectrum of journalists is wildly biased compared to the average citizen. This also apparently shows up with censorship of phone apps.
Why is that the case though? Do conservatives not like going into journalism? Or does become a journalist turn one away from conservatism?
Extremely hostile workplace environment. Like the southern jim crow experience.
Conservative journalists are lynched for sitting at the same lunch table as their non-conservative colleagues? I think I would've heard about that...
>I would add "fake news" to hate speech.
What are you doing? Are you trying to ban speech you don't like? What body determines what is "fake news" and "hate speech"? It can't be done, which is why the only sane policy is free speech.
We have laws against violence, and it's a very clear line.
Sorry, it was meant as rhetorical stupidity.
And even that is destructive. The slippery slope of "speech I don't like" has a tendency to ever expand; not completely unlike, say, government. It is a very human tendency. This is the main reason, even small encroachment should be pointed out.
I think we are in agreement on Google's case in particular being a little more straight forward.
Your suggestion sounds nice in principle, but how would you propose to create mandated democratic control of a corporate entity?
The only mechanism which exists I can think of would be to nationalize the corporate entity and have the folks controlling it be elected positions. That seems pretty extreme though as a response to a corporate entity becoming successful and growing enough that it influences the zeitgeist.
That does not sound extreme at all to me. It would not need to be controlled by people in elected positions - it could just be mandated that employees have to follow a specific charter and be as neutral as possible. A bit like many national news services, like the BBC. Considering how much influence Alphabet's products (especially Search) have gained over everyone's lives, I think something like that is much overdue and the only reasonable solution. That, or extreme regulation. At the very least, the search algorithm should be made fully public.
It also goes the other way.
Section 230 was about child pornography and became used as a safe harbor for anything.
I am not usually agreeing w the Trump admin but they do have a point there.
In general our thinking about freedom of speech is itself idiosyncratic in the same way. Human FREEDOMS means doing what you want. It’s not the same as a right to a megaphone maintained by thousands of employees and infrastructure of large corporations to give you a platform to say anything unfiltered to 5 million people at once. I would argue that such interpretations of the First Amendment have been detrimental to society. Speech on giant platforms should be vetted like on Wikipedia’s Talk Page, where mutually distrusting people engage in responsible fact checking BEFORE the crowd sees the main page with these claims.
But hey I also argue similarly that the supreme court’s Heller decision similarly obviated the Well Regulated Militia clause into irrelevancy, so now anyone can have a gun no matter whether they are part of any well regulated organization or not. No checks on individual action that can affect others.
Now we reap what we sow as a society. Yes FREEDOM of speech is important but what we call freedom today has greatly expanded even to unlimited political donations by super PACs and so on. Again a supreme court decision where expanding freedoms in Citizens United harms democracy. A win for ideologal purity I guess, but is socity better off?
PS: before someone objects with “who will be the factcheckers/watchers I will say it will be self selected and self policed like on Wikipedia, as long as there is a healthy mix of views, it’s better than one wacko with a megaphone. Who does this celebrity culture help? It further divides us. And that’s why we can’t have nice things!
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was chosen for a reason in contrast to the term Locke used (estate): individual freedom was supposed to be balanced with the interests of the society that allowed them to exist and be pursued in the first place, which are what courts consider fundamental rights.
>Section 230 was about child pornography
What? It most certainly was not!
The CDA as a whole was an attempt to regulate indecency and obscenity on the internet. Think "pornography that might be seen by minors"[0]. (Remember, this was the 90s.) Most of it (with the exception of section 230) was struck down in court for obvious first-amendment reasons. Section 230 was added later during the process by the House, after the bill had passed through the Senate, and was more about defamation than anything else[1].
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/652... - search for "This title may be cited as the ``Communications Decency Act of 1996''."
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
Sadly, Wikipedia's been controlled by a whole number of wackos with megaphones for years. I wouldn't trust them to fact check my big toe.
> It always starts like that.
That's the "slippery slope" fallacy. There's a knee-jerk reaction in America that any censorship is bad and will somehow always lead to more censorship. But there area places where censorship has been implemented in small ways and it hasn't led to some sort of free speech apocalypse. In Germany or Israel, for instance, it's illegal to deny the holocaust. That's a pretty sensible limit considering their history. All these years later, they're still free an functioning democracies.
I believe you will find that's the fallacy fallacy.
Kindly take this as a devils advocate post before you reflexively downvote.
It looks like letting people say anything they want on major social media platforms is only having one major positive effect: a few advertising companies are becoming very rich.
The negative effects include:
- incited violence (gang-oriented gun crime in Chicago is often fanned by social media posts for example)
- bad medical decisions (vaccine/COVID misinformation)
- cancel culture/political manipulation (people taking other people's posts as facts when they are not)
I would like to uphold the principle of free speech and forcing social media providers to be free speech agents even though they are private companies, but it's starting to get hard to defend. I am losing faith that strict adherence to free speech is going to result in a smarter, happier humanity. It might be better if less people speak their mind.
I think it's obvious that if less people speak their mind, we could have a smarter, happier humanity.
But I also think it's obvious that I shouldn't trust you to make the decision of who needs to shut up. And definitely not the government.
> But I also think it's obvious that I shouldn't trust you to make the decision of who needs to shut up. And definitely not the government.
Well right now social media companies seem to have that power. How is that better?
I hear this point all the time. Is there a better response than this?
> Well right now social media companies seem to have that power. How is that better?
It's not; we're attempting to fix that, and TFA is about Google maliciously attacking one such attempt.
> I would like to uphold the principle of free speech
No, you completely against that principle.
Which powerful, privileged people should get to decide what we are allowed to hear about? When the power is inevitably abused, how can we address that abuse when we may not be allowed to know about it?
Is it even necessary for free speech to directly result in a happier humanity? What if it simply preserves the conditions that we need for progress, or merely keeps us from sliding backwards? Would that be enough to make it worthwhile for you?
> Which powerful, privileged people should get to decide what we are allowed to hear about?
Journalists and news media, bound by the respect and principles of their profession, fulfilled this function in the past. There seemed to be a time in the past where division between reporting and editorials were more separate. We've destroyed the institution of news media without a good replacement; now people are taking editorials (people's social media posts) as the equivalent of news.
> Is it even necessary for free speech to directly result in a happier humanity?
If not then what is it worth?
> What if it simply preserves the conditions that we need for progress
I'm simply not seeing how social media after a good 10 years of it is progressing anything other than the profits of its owners.
The respect and principles of the profession and a bucket or horse piss will get you a bucket of horse piss - it isn't worth anything and certainly not as a check on power.
It is nonsensical to claim social media destroyed the news media. It was already dying before the internet let alone social media. To put blame on it is a blatant lie from the losers of the old era who got regularly dunked on by bloggers and forum posters in basic fact checking.
Early wikipedia "not suitable for reports" clearly did a better job. They didn't catch up with the internet until it got basic enough for them to follow it with Twitter.
Everyone is constantly complaining about private censorship being a slippery slope...
And yet today, despite decades of "censorship" by Facebook and Google, you can see whatever porn you want, snuff films, terrorist propaganda, hate speech, libel/slander spread by instigators like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. Just not on Google or Facebook.
Different private entities and people have different levels of tolerance. If you want filth, use Gab or 4chan/8chan. If you want forums that are partially moderated, use Facebook/Google/Reddit. If you want forums that are fully moderated, join a private or niche board like HN.
It might be Apple forcing them to do so. For example you can't publish app with porn content. Even if your app is some kind of forum, you're obliged at least to filter out explicit content in the app.
Browser seems to be an exception.
Apple is forcing Google to remove apps from play store? How?
Let's see their owners first.
I know nobody reads the articles but what about reading the title?
Does reddit filter out porn in the reddit iOS app? And what would Apple have to do with Google’s Play Store?
Yes with the standard settings in place you have to navigate directly to nsfw subreddits and even then there is a age restriction in place. There are no auto fill suggestions nor search results and there is no nsfw content on the /r/all page inside the app.