I read this the other week before the site got taken down and I found it to be incredibly prophetic.
I especially enjoyed this part:
"The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed."
While the memes-as-viruses thing can be illustrative, it can also be oversold. We don't actually live in Snow Crash. Putting the wrong text in front of people does not turn them into zombies. The reality is both more banal and more horrifying: people out there genuinely have minds and mindsets that are different from your own, and arrive at conclusions that feel the same to them as yours do to you.
It’s not that people’s opinions are harmful to themselves, per se. Its that they are harmful to society as a whole. Right now, a hundred thousand Americans have died because of the meme factories. Millions more will die from the “climate change is fake” meme.
Anyone can come up with a story about how a policy they don’t like is harmful. That cannot be the bar for censoring its advocacy. What of the families and immortal souls destroyed by libertine sexual mores? What of the crimes committed because the system was swayed by memes about rehabilitation? What of the livelihoods destroyed by immigration? These harms are just as real to your opponents as COVID and climate change are to you.
See, you just assumed I don’t worry about those things, but I worry about all of them. There are thousands, if not millions of people worldwide held in slavery because of loose sexual morals. Some criminals can clearly never be rehabilitated, and separating those who can is a wicked problem. And in the Late Bronze Age Collapse, hordes of immigrants very nearly destroyed Western Civilization. So yes I am freaked out about these things.
The idea that I don’t worry about morals and livelihoods because I’m a liberal is another dangerous meme. Not once in my post did I suggest censorship as the solution; you’re applying the liberals wanna censor meme.
So you’re shutting down thinking because you had preconceived notions from media you saw: thanks for proving my original point.
I'd to posit that the "Yes, and.." through-line in this discussion is that there are no narratives/memes which cannot be weaponized into infectious parasitism by Moloch; including the very model of ideas as viruses, the tacit implication that Something Should Be Done About That, stories of censorship, anti-censorship, anti-anti-censorship, on and on.
I certainly don't think it's wise to ignore the problem, and pretend the internet is merely Printing Press 2.0; but neither is realistic to cut it off at the source (even the printing press was not without side effects). The call is coming from inside the house (the human nervous system and its emergent inter-networked social incentives).
One of the things I wonder about transhumanism and AI is whether we even want to optimize for human values. Or, in religious terms, original sin is real. But what value set we choose to optimize for, that's the problem. And the central question of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where it never really gets resolved either.
> even the printing press was not without side effects)
I'm sure there's some position you hold that others worry about. If worrying about a thing is enough to treat speech in favor of it as a virus to be quarantined, that's going to come back on you somewhere.
I did briefly consider the possibility of being both left and right authoritarian at the same time, but since this ideology is rarely seen outside the state of Gilead in the The Haidmaid's Tale, took a calculated risk. You're right, my apologies. (And if you haven't seen the Hulu series, it's kind of fascinating: extreme religious conservative sexual repression but with solar panels and EVs and post-money command economy. The show fills this out a little more than the book did).
> people out there genuinely have minds and mindsets that are different from your own
This is true and important (and I'd add that if it doesn't make you uncomfortable... either you haven't taken in the full depth of it, or your mindset is very different from my own).
At the same time, though, there's already research that shows mindsets can be at primed by language, stories, even sensory experience. It's unlikely that people can be remote controlled, but it does appear they can be manipulated and have their mindset moved at least marginally by as minor an intervention as holding a warm drink, and I don't think anyone has a good idea of how far that can go for large-scale long-term information environment efforts.
Yes. And some people are illiberal. Some people don't like the conflict and confusion and disruption of a liberal democracy; they'd rather a consensus of "people like us". And bad things happen when they support a leader who promises to make things simple.
This is not a left vs right thing, it's a liberty vs autocracy thing. If the popular autocrats win, they punish the people who have "mindsets that are different from" their supporters.
> Some people don't like the conflict and confusion and disruption of a liberal democracy; they'd rather a consensus of "people like us". ... they punish the people who have "mindsets that are different from" their supporters.
I'm sorry but I need to whip out this quote from SSC once again:
"Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.
> This is not a left vs right thing, it's a liberty vs autocracy thing. If the popular autocrats win, they punish the people who have "mindsets that are different from" their supporters.
... Idk why you chose to use liberals in your example when their push for woke political correctness is nothing short of autocratic thought control.
Parent was using the original meaning of the word "liberal" not the modern mainly US meaning of "left wing" (which was called liberal because a long time ago it was largely about making freedom of thought, religion, and commerce legal)
If putting the wrong text in front of people can make them attend large public gatherings in the middle of a pandemic, that's pretty powerful and pretty comparably troubling. (Of course, it's not an entirely novel phenomenon either - the stereotypical mob with pitchforks and torches is basically the same kind of thing.)
> If putting the wrong text in front of people can make them attend large public gatherings in the middle of a pandemic,
Are you referring to people who attended the Trump rallies or the protestors against racism?
There are some things that people judge to be more important than the risk of Covid-19. Whether you find that reasonable or not, may say a lot more about your priors and priorities than about the logic of the people gathering.
Meh, the analogy breaks down too early for it to be useful or scary. Viruses infect you whether you choose to be infected or not. You can choose the type of information you read. You can use your rational thought to process what is in front of you. You can decided whether or not it is valuable, true, helpful, insightful, and so on.
If the point of this "meditation" is to show that freedom of speech is bad, then they need to prove the assumption that a lack of freedom of speech leads to higher quality information and less manipulation of the truth. History has proven otherwise.
I especially enjoyed this part:
"The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed."