> his incentives are still infinitely better than those of any government because Facebook's status is built on consent rather than coercion.
Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.
Governance is not synonymous with government. All governments are coercive and unethical, but governance is fine as long as it's consensual. Facebook practice governance as well but generally only over people who have given their consent. I'm not one of those people, so Facebook has never tried to exercise authority over me. That's obviously not the case with the government that claim the area I live in as their territory.
> That's obviously not the case with the government that claim the area I live in as their territory.
This view is rather child-like - not childish. Something a kid in a philosophy/arts major would wax lyrical about. Well intentioned but wide of the mark.
You could vapourize humanity leaving a few thousand groups of kids. Check back a few thousand years later and governments will be up and running. The distribution of burden for our highly social species essentially dictates that we function in groups - whether that be your family, clan, tribe, town, chiefdom, city, kingdom, empire or state.
In less pie in the sky language - governments tax its people in return for stability, safety and meter out punishment fairly. The fact that you are alive is proof of that, seeing as the neighbour whom you hate hasn't yet killed you nor you him (hopefully) because going to jail is not appealing to either of you, especially if you kill someone for some absurd reason as they looked at me funny, I dont like em
The land you own and all your possession are garuanteed by the state. No one can wake up tomorrow and claim you are on their grandfathers goat farm from 299 years ago - even if true.
I can see what you are trying to say but I can't see how we can compare them in this sense People involuntarily are born into a government, without choice. Yet they get to pick which Corp to be governed by when joining social media.
They govern completely different things (policies made and shaped for completely diff functions)and if this FB leadership was in charge of a country it would fail immediately. Apples to oranges IMO
If you hold that all governments are unethical do you pay taxes, get mail, stop driving if pulled over by a policeman, etc.? Is it equally unethical for a government to provide for collective defense, collect taxes, enforce contracts, imprison people or to control borders?
If you're willing to admit that there are gradations to the inherent unethicalness of government actions then it's at least conceivable to grade them on the same ethical scale as every other group.
You have fundamentally the same position as someone who claims "there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." There may be some truth to that worldview, but people have to live in the world where both governments and capitalism are the status quo. Both sentiments are broad enough to critique a large fraction of human society, and thus can be pulled out as a 'reason' for targeting any particular aspect one may instinctively dislike without having to put in the mental effort to determine why.
Secondly, you say Facebook has governance only over people who have given their consent. Taking second order effects into account this is clearly not true. Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya genocide by UN Fact Finding Mission. Negative externalities exist, and in practice they can be quite common.
> Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya
Not to make @noooooo point for him, but you're forgetting about the most determining factor in that, the actual government that was doing the genocide. Maybe he has a point about governments being unethical...
It's a first-principals understanding of the world that is attractive to technically-minded people - building complex rules from simpler rules like the 'non-aggression principal'
Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook's voting stock. While Facebook the platform may have grown in unforeseen ways, Facebook the company remains ultimately (legally) under the control of one man. There is no reasonable comparison between Tim Berners Lee and Mark Zuckerberg when considering how much influence they have over their creations.
Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from the rest of your sentence is not what you intended. I would not have read it this way from the phrase 'A big mistake, but she owned it.'
I think this is missing the point of the no-longer-free-speach-absolutist sentiment (henceforth NLFSA). You note, correctly I think, that
> we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, and dangerous lies from credible, verified institutions including the former POTUS, prominent newspapers, and other important cultural institutions.
The NLFSA notes that we've been seeing a new attack on free speech and free thought emerge, namely Steven Bannon 'flood the zone with shit' approach.
The classical free speech position is to fight bad ideas with better ideas, fight bad speech with good. We're running into largely unprecedented problems (in the anglosphere, at least) where bad speech is drowning out the good. There are many things we can point as possible causes (say the internet changing communication patterns, information siloing, propaganda, etc.) and there aren't clear solutions.
Conventional free speech absolutism prevents you from being muzzled -- but that's it. Acknowledging you can be silenced by a chorus of people shouting over you requires a new position.
> I don't know how someone can look at American politics and politicians (never mind cultural institutions) over the last ~decade and conclude that these people are fit to regulate Americans' speech.
The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.
I think it's reasonable to see all this, and despite our problems double down on convention free speech absolutism -- that being muzzled is the most dangerous form of intervention, that better speech will ultimately win out over bad ideas. But I don't fault someone for changing their mind to try to combat rampant conspiracy theories.
> The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.
It seems like the appropriate posture is being positively in favor of the best thing we've got (free speech) while acknowledging the limitations. Which is a long way of saying the appropriate posture is that of a free speech proponent. After all, free speech proponents aren't arguing that free speech completely solves the speech quality problem--only that the best we can do is allow debate to select for the best speech.
Note also that the soft restrictions and political tests we've put in place in our epistemological institutions have predictably degraded public trust in those institutions and the void is being exploited by different and often worse authoritarians.
Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).
Instead, we're building a system that regards all right-wing positions (and a fair number of moderate liberal positions) as uniformly "far-right" such that there are fewer incentives to hold a respectable position and instead we get dishonest extremists on either side. It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.
I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others". That being said
> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).
I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.
I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.
I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.
> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.
I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.
> I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.
I think we're saying something very similar here? This is what I meant when I said "you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas".
To be clear, I think the "conservatives being driven out of epistemological institutions" (not "centrist spaces") and "the rise of anti-intellectualism in rightwing spaces" are two symptoms of the same phenomena (so while I might agree that one symptom is worse than the other, the cure is the same). Notably, when we regard everything right of far-left as "uniformly evil" then you erase any incentive that would otherwise cause respectable rightwing ideas to rise above unsavory rightwing ideas.
> I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions.
Objectivity and neutrality were ideals that we held much like equality, but to your point we never perfected them (I never meant to imply otherwise).
> I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.
Yes, to be quite clear, we have failed at various points in history to perfectly uphold our ideals. The whole deal with "progress" is that we want to advance toward our ideals, and if we're really progressing, the past ought to be less moral than the present. There's merit in pointing out failures to prioritize identity over objectivity, but the left errs on the remedy: in response to prioritizing a white identity politics over objectivity they respond by prioritizing an anti-white identity politics over objectivity. The correct response is to prioritize objectivity over identity politics altogether, at least assuming we want to live in a world that is prosperous, just, harmonious, etc.
You are substituting "the West" for rgbrenner's "those on the side of human rights", and in doing so are missing the point of his argument.
"The West" as a term is very broad and sufficiently undefined[0] that it makes a great rhetorical cudgel (both for people who support it and those against it). Unfortunately that same slipperiness makes it challenging for people trying to speak clearly. While "the West" has often been loosely aligned with human rights (some defending/embracing them, some merely claiming them as magic words) they certainly have their problems.
Your argument seems to be do the following: substitute an inferior term into rgbrenner's argument, and then complaining that your chosen term is inferior.
rgbrenner:> The sides aren't US and China, they're X and anti-X
you:> You say the sides are Y and anti-X, but Y isn't X
[0]: Do we mean America? America + Western Europe? Are we including Canada? How about Mexico? All colonial powers? Does Eastern Europe count? How about Australia? Or even Japan? You might have a particular definition in mind, but it's likely other people have different understandings.
I think you're out of luck simply because Americans dominate the English speaking internet. According to loosely eyeballed data [0], Americans account for over 20% of English speakers (a commanding plurality) and over 60% of native speakers. It might not be fair, and there are plenty of valid reasons to want to talk about other countries and other perspectives, but it's going to remain the default perspective of the English speaking internet unless demographics substantially shift.
> Rent-seeking by itself is morally neutral, like guns. Like a gun, it's how you use it that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society.
This strikes me as a bad analogy. What differentiates your statement from
Theft by itself is morally neutral, [...] it's what you steal that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society.
You might be willing to endorse that statement, but I think most people would not.
I think that if you want to assert that rent-seeking is tool-like, with multiple uses some positive and some negative, then the burden of proof is on you to provide some examples.
From a previous discussion of this paper I took away the following clarifying insight:
The Drake equation is usually turned into the Fermi paradox via some estimations that show the average (mean) number of alien civilizations we expect to see is large (>1).
However, just because the mean is large does not imply that seeing 0 is low probability.
More concretely, suppose there were 10 possible 'parallel' universes. In 9 of them humanity is alone and in the tenth there are tens of millions of alien civilizations. The probability of appearing to be alone is 90% even though the number of alien civilizations we'd expect to see is in the millions.
You don't even need to invoke parallel universes. Look at the Hubble Deep Field photo[0]. Our observable universe has hundreds of millions of galaxies. It's entirely feasible for tens of millions of alien civilizations to be spread about and not visible to us in the narrow window of space and time in which we've been looking.
Invoking parallel universes was solely for ease of explaining/emphasizing the math, not because I think it's a realistic model.
Talking about the Hubble Deep Field kind of misses the point. The original Drake equation[0] estimates the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. I probably should have used galaxies in my example, but left it with parallel universes as that is the common phrase.
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.
Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.
"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.
There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.
> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]
This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.
Presumably a single person or small group attempting such would be engaged in market manipulation as traditionally understood, and the SEC would try to charge them. (But I am neither a lawyer nor a financial expert, so the above is just uninformed speculation.)
Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.