"We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all."
I truly can't understand how it's possible to write this sentence with a (metaphorically) straight face. Whichever side of the political aisle you're on, you must be able to point t…
"We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all."
I truly can't understand how it's possible to write this sentence with a (metaphorically) straight face. Whichever side of the political aisle you're on, you must be able to point to millions of people who you don't think are responsible adults. People who, if they gained control of government, would bring all of your nightmares to life.
But the problem isn't that these people are just evil. It's that they're horribly, dangerously misinformed about the world. And they do not, even for a second, recognise that freedom comes with responsibilities.
So if you want to know what's frightening about a world where bad actors are free to pump out lies and propaganda to millions of people every day, ask yourself why the BLM rioters set swathes of America on fire because they thought tens of thousands of innocent black people were being gunned down by cops. When the *actual* number of unarmed black people killed by cops per year is in the teens.
Ask yourself how vaccines have almost totally eradicated several serious, life destroying diseases, and yet thousands of parents are now too scared to give these potentially life-saving vaccines to their kids, leading to new outbreaks of those same diseases.
Ask yourself how we've arrived in a position where several countries are passing laws that remove the distinctions between men and women to such an absurd degree that male rapists are being housed in women's prisons. Or where we can no longer agree on the fact that men don't belong in women's sport. Or where depressed children who don't conform slavishly to gender stereotypes are being encouraged to sacrifice their health and reproductive organs to a cult.
Seriously, where have you been??!!
There are millions of people who need "experts" on every single complex political and/or scientific issue. Because they're frankly not smart enough to figure out what's true. As George Carlin famously put it, "Think of how dumb the average person is, well, half of them are dumber than that!"
And all of us, every single person who would dare make a claim to intelligence, recognises that they need "experts" on some things. Because no-one alive has the time or intelligence to "do their own research" on every topic.
So yes, the world *is* complicated. It was complicated even before it became impossible to tell whether the information you were consuming came from a Russian-bot or a real person. But now, in the age of deepfakes and bot farms and algorithmic social media bubbles, I don't understand how anybody doesn't see it.
Of course I agree with your observation that many people make horrible decisions based on untrustworthy information they gleaned from some sort of media, or elsewhere.
My objection to what you wrote was in your ending line where you rhetorically asked something to the effect of “shouldn’t they face consequences “, referring to the purveyors of (what you seem to be categorizing as dangerous) disinformation.
No, hell no, “they” (from whatever camp) should NOT face consequences for telling lies. Fox, WaPo, and every other legacy news outlet makes it a habit to lie about just about everything. And guess what? Without censorship, their influence is fading…..that’s why everyone is on Substack or Rumble or Medium, because, believe it or not, we are smart enough to know that neither Don Lemon nor Sean Hannity has any interest beyond peddling whatever crap gets them clicks.
Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history? When the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and said “Thank God we had censors or we wouldn’t have survived.” I’m serious, not trolling here.
Censors are always protecting something other than the truth….always…..
The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less. If people do bad things based on what they hear, that’s on them. To take one of your examples, many people, black and otherwise, did not riot and burn down stuff when they heard warped, false statistics about police killings. They did other, more rational, legal things, and probably are thankful they didn’t get caught up in the insanity of the moment.
Why do you need consequences? Who decides? What are the penalties for pushing lies in the name of truth when you get caught later on (e.g.weapons of mass destruction)? How many people died for that official lie, which was pedaled as Gospel truth by the guardians of probity and righteousness (like Ari Fleischer, Dubya, John Bolton, etc)? How many lives destroyed by a total lie, which was pushed and ratified and certified by every single organ of our government, media, military for YEARS? Do they get to determine the consequences for us who promote or consume what the pro-censorship crowd is today calling lies? Look at the pro-“consequences ”coalition coalescing around Harris……if Bolton, Cheney, Brennan + Harris, Clinton and Kerry doesn’t frighten your pants off….what will?
"The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less"
Just noticed that I missed this point. No, this is absolutely catastrophically untrue.
The antidote to bad speech is not simply *more* speech, it's *better* speech. Which is what I'm advocating for. Partly because nobody has time to consume an infinite amount of bad information in the hopes of getting to the good stuff, and also because we are not perfect information processing machines that aren't influenced by the repetition of nonsense and lies. Even obvious nonsense and lies.
This is actually a great idea of what I'm talking about. We all know that words doesn't become true just because they've been repeated often. But it sometimes feels like they are.
If you are trying to find a signal in amongst the noise, the solution is not to add more noise. You have two options. Reduce the noise, or strengthen the signal. Most speech, and this has always been the case, is noise. But in the social media age, there is an exponential increase in noise, and especially in the reach of noise, and still roughly the same amount of signal. The reach signal has increased a bit, but depressingly enough, not as much as the reach of noise has.
I'm advocating for efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio. And before you "who gets to decide" me, there are lots of things we have managed to figure out the truth of throughout history. The fact that some things are ambiguous doesn't mean we have to pretend that everything is. I'm not talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or how many prostitutes Donald Trump had sex with. This is just reality-TV crap that "responsible adults" should be smarter than.
I'm talking about things that affect decision we make about our health, or about whether we can have faith in the democratic process, or whether its okay for a former president to undermine millions of people's faith in democracy because his ego couldn't handle his very obvious loss. Information like this is incredibly consequential. And we need to be more careful about it than we are currently being.
"Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history?"
Why are you so focused on censorship?? I haven't at any point, mentioned or condoned censorship. This is just a very common knee-jerk reaction to ANY suggestion that we need to do something about the information crisis that we're facing. The line where I talk about consequences, if you'll notice, is accompanied by several very clear, specific examples of material harm.
And the problem is, I *can't* give you any examples from history, because we are in a completely unprecedented situation. It is already well established that there should be consequences if you shout "fire" in a crowed theatre with, say, 200 people inside, cause a panic, and someone dies in the resulting stampede, right? This is uncontroversial. We can all see the connection between cause and effect.
But if you shout "election interference!!" into a megaphone that instantly reaches hundreds of millions of people, and you keep doing it over and over again for six months, and in the resulting panic, a bunch of people try to hang the vice president and storm the Capitol and 4 (?) people die, that's just free speech, right? We just shrug our shoulders and pretend that there's no connection between these events whatsoever. It's just insane.
And this is before we address the question of deep-fakes and foreign interference and AI.
The world has changed. In terms of information, it has changed more in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 200. And if you think we can deal with the challenges ahead by just being "responsible adults," you are simply not paying attention. Which is especially strange given that, as I said earlier, you can already see preliminary versions of the harm they can cause around you right now.
Consequences, in the case where you cause some clear, material harm, say, should be the same as the consequences that currently exist. Again, I don't know what you're so afraid of. If you tell somebody to kill someone, and they do it, you can't just cry "free speech." You're liable. As you should be.
That's not to say that you can't express a controversial opinion. You're allowed to say, for instance, that vaccines are dangerous. But if you do so repeatedly, with zero evidence, and have no specialist knowledge, maybe we should at least put a disclaimer stating this on your claims *before* they're released to millions of frightened, occasionally irrational people during a pandemic who are absolutely not qualified or responsible enough to appraise those claims accurately.
And to be clear, I include myself in those people. I consider myself to be pretty smart, I have a solid scientific background, but I'm not a doctor. 'm humble enough to understand that I can't appraise information about cutting edge vaccine technology reliably. I don't have a strong enough background to compare different testing protocols. So what I need, what almost everybody needs, is some indicator of how trustworthy the person I'm listening to is and how well verified their claims are. Again, the online world COMPLETELY LACKS these measures. This is the problem I'm pointing to.
I think that people who take advantage of this problem and cause harm by doing so should face consequences for the harm they cause. Again, this is THE SAME SITUATION WE HAVE NOW for offline speech.
The ratio of misinformation due to ignorance and agenda driven disinformation has reached a level that we all should be aware of it, the difficulty is in determining truth since sometimes the way to sell a lie is to make it an outrageously big lie.
I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse.
As an afterthought, when I was in Vietnam I saw and heard communist propaganda purposed to create racial disharmony in American troops. Sadly, some of it was true. It is always most effective to mix truth and lies.
"I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse."
Yep, it's very hard to know who to trust nowadays. But I do think there are some incredibly obvious examples of untrustworthy people in the public sphere, people who we know, for an indisputable fact, have spent years telling the exact opposite of their true views to millions of people. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz spring to mind.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have people like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Judith Butler, Hillary Clinton, I don't think these people, with the exception of Clinton, are as flagrantly dishonest, but they make yp for it by being spectacularly intellectually dishonest which makes their arguments completely moronic.
This is the thing about speech. I'm not at all arguing to limit the kind of speech that ordinary people enjoy. I'm arguing for some checks and balances on people like these, who are enormously influential and simultaneously incredibly damaging to society. It's like the checks and balances that govern trillion dollar financial transaction vs those that affect your purchases.
And I'm not even arguing these people shouldn't be able to say what they want, I'm arguing that their audiences should be reminded that these people have said the exact opposite, or that their arguments have no basis in facts or evidence, or that sweeping generalisations about any group of people are intellectually bankrupt.
We should remind their audiences of these facts on a regular basis. And if they're still dumb enough to follow them, well, at least it's something.
"We just want to be left alone to be responsible adults, recognizing that with freedom, our birthright, comes responsibilities. It ain’t complicated….at all."
I truly can't understand how it's possible to write this sentence with a (metaphorically) straight face. Whichever side of the political aisle you're on, you must be able to point to millions of people who you don't think are responsible adults. People who, if they gained control of government, would bring all of your nightmares to life.
But the problem isn't that these people are just evil. It's that they're horribly, dangerously misinformed about the world. And they do not, even for a second, recognise that freedom comes with responsibilities.
So if you want to know what's frightening about a world where bad actors are free to pump out lies and propaganda to millions of people every day, ask yourself why the BLM rioters set swathes of America on fire because they thought tens of thousands of innocent black people were being gunned down by cops. When the *actual* number of unarmed black people killed by cops per year is in the teens.
Ask yourself how vaccines have almost totally eradicated several serious, life destroying diseases, and yet thousands of parents are now too scared to give these potentially life-saving vaccines to their kids, leading to new outbreaks of those same diseases.
Ask yourself how we've arrived in a position where several countries are passing laws that remove the distinctions between men and women to such an absurd degree that male rapists are being housed in women's prisons. Or where we can no longer agree on the fact that men don't belong in women's sport. Or where depressed children who don't conform slavishly to gender stereotypes are being encouraged to sacrifice their health and reproductive organs to a cult.
Seriously, where have you been??!!
There are millions of people who need "experts" on every single complex political and/or scientific issue. Because they're frankly not smart enough to figure out what's true. As George Carlin famously put it, "Think of how dumb the average person is, well, half of them are dumber than that!"
And all of us, every single person who would dare make a claim to intelligence, recognises that they need "experts" on some things. Because no-one alive has the time or intelligence to "do their own research" on every topic.
So yes, the world *is* complicated. It was complicated even before it became impossible to tell whether the information you were consuming came from a Russian-bot or a real person. But now, in the age of deepfakes and bot farms and algorithmic social media bubbles, I don't understand how anybody doesn't see it.
Of course I agree with your observation that many people make horrible decisions based on untrustworthy information they gleaned from some sort of media, or elsewhere.
My objection to what you wrote was in your ending line where you rhetorically asked something to the effect of “shouldn’t they face consequences “, referring to the purveyors of (what you seem to be categorizing as dangerous) disinformation.
No, hell no, “they” (from whatever camp) should NOT face consequences for telling lies. Fox, WaPo, and every other legacy news outlet makes it a habit to lie about just about everything. And guess what? Without censorship, their influence is fading…..that’s why everyone is on Substack or Rumble or Medium, because, believe it or not, we are smart enough to know that neither Don Lemon nor Sean Hannity has any interest beyond peddling whatever crap gets them clicks.
Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history? When the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and said “Thank God we had censors or we wouldn’t have survived.” I’m serious, not trolling here.
Censors are always protecting something other than the truth….always…..
The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less. If people do bad things based on what they hear, that’s on them. To take one of your examples, many people, black and otherwise, did not riot and burn down stuff when they heard warped, false statistics about police killings. They did other, more rational, legal things, and probably are thankful they didn’t get caught up in the insanity of the moment.
Why do you need consequences? Who decides? What are the penalties for pushing lies in the name of truth when you get caught later on (e.g.weapons of mass destruction)? How many people died for that official lie, which was pedaled as Gospel truth by the guardians of probity and righteousness (like Ari Fleischer, Dubya, John Bolton, etc)? How many lives destroyed by a total lie, which was pushed and ratified and certified by every single organ of our government, media, military for YEARS? Do they get to determine the consequences for us who promote or consume what the pro-censorship crowd is today calling lies? Look at the pro-“consequences ”coalition coalescing around Harris……if Bolton, Cheney, Brennan + Harris, Clinton and Kerry doesn’t frighten your pants off….what will?
"The solution to solving the problems you outlined above is getting more information out there, not less. More, not less"
Just noticed that I missed this point. No, this is absolutely catastrophically untrue.
The antidote to bad speech is not simply *more* speech, it's *better* speech. Which is what I'm advocating for. Partly because nobody has time to consume an infinite amount of bad information in the hopes of getting to the good stuff, and also because we are not perfect information processing machines that aren't influenced by the repetition of nonsense and lies. Even obvious nonsense and lies.
This is actually a great idea of what I'm talking about. We all know that words doesn't become true just because they've been repeated often. But it sometimes feels like they are.
If you are trying to find a signal in amongst the noise, the solution is not to add more noise. You have two options. Reduce the noise, or strengthen the signal. Most speech, and this has always been the case, is noise. But in the social media age, there is an exponential increase in noise, and especially in the reach of noise, and still roughly the same amount of signal. The reach signal has increased a bit, but depressingly enough, not as much as the reach of noise has.
I'm advocating for efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio. And before you "who gets to decide" me, there are lots of things we have managed to figure out the truth of throughout history. The fact that some things are ambiguous doesn't mean we have to pretend that everything is. I'm not talking about Hunter Biden's laptop or how many prostitutes Donald Trump had sex with. This is just reality-TV crap that "responsible adults" should be smarter than.
I'm talking about things that affect decision we make about our health, or about whether we can have faith in the democratic process, or whether its okay for a former president to undermine millions of people's faith in democracy because his ego couldn't handle his very obvious loss. Information like this is incredibly consequential. And we need to be more careful about it than we are currently being.
"Please give me a historical example or two of when the censors were on the right side of history?"
Why are you so focused on censorship?? I haven't at any point, mentioned or condoned censorship. This is just a very common knee-jerk reaction to ANY suggestion that we need to do something about the information crisis that we're facing. The line where I talk about consequences, if you'll notice, is accompanied by several very clear, specific examples of material harm.
And the problem is, I *can't* give you any examples from history, because we are in a completely unprecedented situation. It is already well established that there should be consequences if you shout "fire" in a crowed theatre with, say, 200 people inside, cause a panic, and someone dies in the resulting stampede, right? This is uncontroversial. We can all see the connection between cause and effect.
But if you shout "election interference!!" into a megaphone that instantly reaches hundreds of millions of people, and you keep doing it over and over again for six months, and in the resulting panic, a bunch of people try to hang the vice president and storm the Capitol and 4 (?) people die, that's just free speech, right? We just shrug our shoulders and pretend that there's no connection between these events whatsoever. It's just insane.
And this is before we address the question of deep-fakes and foreign interference and AI.
The world has changed. In terms of information, it has changed more in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 200. And if you think we can deal with the challenges ahead by just being "responsible adults," you are simply not paying attention. Which is especially strange given that, as I said earlier, you can already see preliminary versions of the harm they can cause around you right now.
Consequences, in the case where you cause some clear, material harm, say, should be the same as the consequences that currently exist. Again, I don't know what you're so afraid of. If you tell somebody to kill someone, and they do it, you can't just cry "free speech." You're liable. As you should be.
That's not to say that you can't express a controversial opinion. You're allowed to say, for instance, that vaccines are dangerous. But if you do so repeatedly, with zero evidence, and have no specialist knowledge, maybe we should at least put a disclaimer stating this on your claims *before* they're released to millions of frightened, occasionally irrational people during a pandemic who are absolutely not qualified or responsible enough to appraise those claims accurately.
And to be clear, I include myself in those people. I consider myself to be pretty smart, I have a solid scientific background, but I'm not a doctor. 'm humble enough to understand that I can't appraise information about cutting edge vaccine technology reliably. I don't have a strong enough background to compare different testing protocols. So what I need, what almost everybody needs, is some indicator of how trustworthy the person I'm listening to is and how well verified their claims are. Again, the online world COMPLETELY LACKS these measures. This is the problem I'm pointing to.
I think that people who take advantage of this problem and cause harm by doing so should face consequences for the harm they cause. Again, this is THE SAME SITUATION WE HAVE NOW for offline speech.
I hope that you have time to watch this.
https://youtu.be/kuQ8Bv330C0?si=BpWjgatjWUMnH9wh
The ratio of misinformation due to ignorance and agenda driven disinformation has reached a level that we all should be aware of it, the difficulty is in determining truth since sometimes the way to sell a lie is to make it an outrageously big lie.
I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse.
As an afterthought, when I was in Vietnam I saw and heard communist propaganda purposed to create racial disharmony in American troops. Sadly, some of it was true. It is always most effective to mix truth and lies.
"I wish that I enjoyed the comfort of trust, especially in those that I would like to support, but it seems quite impossible and it's getting worse."
Yep, it's very hard to know who to trust nowadays. But I do think there are some incredibly obvious examples of untrustworthy people in the public sphere, people who we know, for an indisputable fact, have spent years telling the exact opposite of their true views to millions of people. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz spring to mind.
On the other side of the political spectrum, we have people like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X Kendi, Judith Butler, Hillary Clinton, I don't think these people, with the exception of Clinton, are as flagrantly dishonest, but they make yp for it by being spectacularly intellectually dishonest which makes their arguments completely moronic.
This is the thing about speech. I'm not at all arguing to limit the kind of speech that ordinary people enjoy. I'm arguing for some checks and balances on people like these, who are enormously influential and simultaneously incredibly damaging to society. It's like the checks and balances that govern trillion dollar financial transaction vs those that affect your purchases.
And I'm not even arguing these people shouldn't be able to say what they want, I'm arguing that their audiences should be reminded that these people have said the exact opposite, or that their arguments have no basis in facts or evidence, or that sweeping generalisations about any group of people are intellectually bankrupt.
We should remind their audiences of these facts on a regular basis. And if they're still dumb enough to follow them, well, at least it's something.