> The prophetic accuracy of Bradbury’s work is evident in the recent controversy over Joe Rogan’s podcast.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this.
Suppose I choose to personaly "censor" and stop paying attention to Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, reddit and that crappy podcast on Spotify, after I understand they're just cesspools of ignorance, childish memes and tribalism. Now I can use that time to read books from authors I don't necessarily agree with but that can engage me in a deeper discussion. Am I really practising "censorship"?
My point is: selecting quality is not "censorship" it is mental hygiene. Bad discussions and bad ideas should really be discarded. When you tune out from a creationist, anti-vaxer, flat-earth prophet or global warming denier you are selecting for quality.
A debate where all opinions are equally valid is not healthy. Logically sound opinions are better than stupid ones. It is the most fundamental idea from Information Theory: filter out the noise, keep the signal.
Information overload forces you to do selection. And that's not "censorship".
You're not censoring anything - you're exercising your judgement. Who would have a problem with that? Not me!
But, have you ever been convinced about something, and then changed your mind? I have.
In order for that to happen (a change of mind) it is useful to have full/better information available. But if there are forces at play (eg coordinated FAANG efforts, see Alex Jones) to supress information, the possibility of finding that information is removed. You are making reasonable decisions, but you do not have the full facts. You do not even know that you don't have the full facts.
This is not a good state to be in!
The messy noise is not a bad thing. Even if you want to stick to what you know, others will trawl through that information and will uncover some gems. I mean, its not like governments and corporations don't conspire together for whatever purposes. They plainly do and we see evidence this with lobbyists, pre-prepared bills waiting for the right moment, the well-emunerated advisory roles provided to ex-politicians, etc.
The point I am trying to make, is that whatever your position is, you want all information to be free and for people to exercise their judgement. Reason will prevail. But de-platforming, etc is terrible! Don't plead to be kept in the dark by the government!
> And I also want it to be free from a cacophony of noise.
OK in this case I think the dystopia you're living in is Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where a tribe of techno-priests professionally searches the Internet to try to find true information among a sea of lies that were machine-generated by large language models which were deployed during various nation-state conflicts and are now permanently endemic on the Internet.
"And I also want it to be free from a cacophony of noise."
Oh dear - I think you have been born in the wrong time. :)
My point is that there aren't external independent arbiters of information out there. No one holds the truth. Facebook even admits that its fact checking is just opinion.
> whatever your position is, you want all information to be free and for people to exercise their judgement. Reason will prevail.
Sounds like a simple solution, but I don’t know of any country that has 100% access to all information, so I don’t think anyone has been able to test your theory throughout history.
I’d argue that a large minority of people are highly persuadable and not near the unbiased, logical arbiters required to have an ideal outcome when presented with information. You can see this in the misinterpretation of valid information and the consumption and retention of misinformation. So, 1) I don’t think the human condition is as ideal as you describe where reason always prevails.
Also, most people agree that some content is too dangerous to disseminate, like content that can be used to create great harm or destruction. Like, blueprints for WMDs, or maybe content about how to breach security at a nuclear facility, or how to hack power plants, etc. So 2) there’s a line somewhere about what content is safe for the general public to consume but I don’t know any country or person that thinks it’s at 100%. So now the question becomes not if we should draw a line at all, but where to draw the line on what content is beneficial to the public.
Yes - some of what you say is true - there is dangerous info.
The question is what is more dangerous? Having information running free? Or having a governance structure that decides what you should see or not?
I do not trust governments for sure. There is such a huge conflict of interest there.
"For the sake of maintaining trust with the people, we can't afford to let them know about such-and-such a terrible mistake we made". (Says government...)
Its just a fantastic excuse to take all sorts of unsavoury actions against you.
And let's not forget that government is just people trying to make money. Arguably the worst of us, or the people with most to lose, are the one's that seek these powerful positions.
> The question is what is more dangerous? Having information running free? Or having a governance structure that decides what you should see or not?
Yeah that’s the $1M question.
We have far too many examples of the latter failing with horrific consequences, and some examples where the restrictions are annoying but not catastrophic.
With the former, I don’t think we have any examples of info running totally free.
>> The prophetic accuracy of Bradbury’s work is evident in the recent controversy over Joe Rogan’s podcast.
> My point is: selecting quality is not "censorship" it is mental hygiene. Bad discussions and bad ideas should really be discarded. When you tune out from a creationist, anti-vaxer, flat-earth prophet or global warming denier you are selecting for quality.
I strongly agree, generally. And I'm not a Rogan fan and I don't listen to his podcast. However, it's also important to keep in mind that in some cases it's easy to confuse quality for ideological compatibility. So you may think you're selecting for quality when you're actually selecting for things that just reinforce your beliefs.
As a kind of relevant aside, I think it's also important to distinguish "seeking the ultimate, correct truth" from "making a timely, reasonable decision." Specifically with a lot of COVID stuff, I think a lot of people have gotten hung up the former in ways that undermine the latter, when the latter is actually the more important thing at this moment.
> Information overload forces you to do selection. And that's not "censorship".
If you, a consumer, are making the decision then it's not censorship. If some company, government, organization, school, etc is making the decision then it is censorship.
Sometimes, perhaps, censorship is called for. And censorship is only illegal if the government is involved. But in general, legal or not, censorship is bad. People should be allowed to say what they think and whether they have a platform should be decided by whether other people want to listen.
What disturbs me about the Joe Rogan situation is that Rogan is not an alt-right deplorable. He's not scary or mean, he exudes youthful exuberance and curiosity. He's thoughtful, un-ideological and he's a good conversationalist. The attempt to brand him as a deplorable is genuinely creepy.
As far as the article goes, I don't think we're close to any dystopia. These are growing pains as the media opens up. I'm optimistic.
Joe Rogan's perception troubles come from having little in the way of standards. He'll have on Penn Jillette one day, then someone who thinks Penn Jillette is a self-censoring, goose-stepping, party line fascist for making his podcast intro nonbinary-inclusive. It's ideological whiplash to someone who observes through an ideological lens.
If you want to really 100% understand where someone you don't otherwise like or agree with is coming from, then three or more unedited hours of that person essentially talking without interruption is a great service. Personally, I haven't found that useful. The summary usually matches the expansion. Tim Pool (for example) made a good point or two that time he was on with the Twitter people, but it didn't meaningfully change what I think of him.
“Suppress” is different from “restrict”. Suppression is “ to end or stop (something) by force” or “ to keep (something) secret : to not allow people to know about or see (something)”
Please, let’s use “censorship” as the word was intended: to mean the total restriction of content. That’s why it’s usually governments who do it. Private companies can typically only do it if they have the exclusive rights to something and refuse to publish it.
If someone is dropped from a platform, they’ve been de-platformed but by no definition of the word have they been censored.
In order for Spotify to actually “censor” Rogan they would have to not publish his content while also not allowing it to be distributed in any form, anywhere else, ever. Presumably either party could cancel the contract and then Rogan would have numerous other platforms to publish on. So in some sense Rogan is self-censoring at best if he continues to honor his Spotify contract.
Also, his podcast is only 1 medium. He could presumably still publish short form video/audio content outside of Spotify, or publish a book without their consent with any content of his choosing. Censorship by the definition of the word would mean banning content across all mediums, which Spotify does not have the authority to do.
In any event, if he really wants to share information with the public Spotify alone cannot censor him and prevent him from doing that. All they can do is restrict access to his podcast.
In this scenario, I think “restrict” or “inhibit” are more accurate and less provocative descriptions of what could happen.
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies.
Seems like your source agrees with me (and I find your quibbling over "suppress" vs. "restrict" absurd). People who are trying to confuse the issue are uncomfortable with the fact that they are pro-censorship. Why not just admit it?
Lol, OK. Sorry but suppress and restrict are very different words with very different definitions.
Restricting content on a single, privately-owned, non-monopolistic platform and total censorship (suppression) are two wildly different things.
Imagine 1984, but the Ministry of Thought requires you to go to the store next door to buy the controversial book you want to read. Annoying yes, but doesn’t quite have the same zing to it.
Censorship is a real problem with disastrous consequences throughout history. It’s definitely worth fighting censorship of ideas, this just isn’t censorship.
I don't agree that censorship means "totally restrict". Your argument there is tendentious.
> Restricting content on a single, privately-owned, non-monopolistic platform and total censorship (suppression) are two wildly different things.
Yes but they both fall in the category of censorship. I'm not saying companies shouldn't be allowed to censor (I wrote: "sometimes, perhaps, censorship is called for"). I'm just saying it's still censorship.
My view is that, in general, companies should not censor. Free speech is good.
> I don't agree that censorship means "totally restrict".
Can you point me to a definition of censorship that supports your view?
Your definition is so broad that anyone who declines to share anything ever is “censoring”.
At that point we need a new word for the action of totally suppressing content everywhere and declining to share content to distinguish between two very different events with two very different outcomes throughout history.
Or I guess a qualifier like “total censorship” vs. “limited distribution censorship”. At this point why not just use the words “censorship” and “restricted” as originally intended?
The way you're using the words "suppress" and "restricted" is bizarre semantic bullshit designed to support your argument. The definition you linked to supports my argument.
> Your definition is so broad that anyone who declines to share anything ever is “censoring”.
No it's not. Individuals are not censoring when they decline to share something. A company or government may be, depending on why.
> The definition you linked to supports my argument.
I honestly don’t see how and if you decide to not explain then I guess we’re done.
Disney can censor their content because they own it and it can’t legally be reproduced or redistributed elsewhere. Otherwise, it’s really challenging for a private company to censor someone who can simply produce content elsewhere.
The reason I’m making a big deal about the semantics is that censorship and free speech are charged words that get people riled up, and for good reason. But they lose their meaning if we start applying them to temporary, minor restrictions rather than actual suppression.
It’s like saying you’re being censored if you can’t say whatever you want in the lobby of Spotify HQ. No, that’s private property and you don’t have that right. Go to the public square and say whatever you want there — no one is censoring you.
The idea that you can do or say whatever you want on private property is bizarre to me. That’s never been part of any country’s laws or cultural history.
When Rogan can’t say something on his own platform or in a public setting or 1 company controls the large majority of content distribution, then I’m with you 100% that that’s censorship. Until then it’s the market at work and non-monopolistic companies conducting business within the bounds of their contract. If you don’t like it, take your content and your business somewhere else, it’s a free country.
> My view is that, in general, companies should not censor. Free speech is good.
Really? Should HN moderatos literally let every post go on unchecked? If someone starts posting links to a Kardashian selfie blog, or to NSFW stuff, why should HN allow it? It's NOT censorship, HN is in no way obligated to allow everything on its site. Free speech is good. Heck, it's awesome. You want to post NSFW or Kim Kardashian, go create a blog. It's pretty much free and you can reach the whole world.
> My view is that, in general, companies should not censor. Free speech is good.
This does not line up. A private company "censoring" is actually exercising its right to free speech. The alternati e is compelled speech. You can't have it both ways.
That’s true to a degree except that most of the companies involved have made their position by selling it as a platform that anyone can use and that the content on the platform is explicitly not the speech of the platform provider.
Every major online platform has a ToS and in this case, Spotify has a contract with Rogan. So, it's not like a public square that anyone can use, it's more like private property with terms and conditions.
Maybe people think these platforms are open to anyone because they don't read the user agreements, they just click "agree".
> the content on the platform is explicitly not the speech of the platform provider.
Sure, kind of like a book store didn't write the books, but they get to choose which ones they want to give you access to.
> Please, let’s use “censorship” as the word was intended: to mean the total restriction of content.
In a faraway land, a new law has just been enacted: all public criticism of the government is now a crime. However, the law contains an exception – it will not apply in designated Official Government Criticism Zones, which will be established in convenient locations throughout the country. Would you say that, since government-critical content is not being totally restricted – it will remain legally permitted in government-designated locations – it isn't being censored?
Maybe:
Censorship is the suppression of content by someone other than the creator or legal owner in a free market such that the creation, distribution, purchase or consumption of the content by the public is impossible or unreasonably burdensome
Basically trying to differentiate between a 1984 scenario (censorship) and someone buying a painting and not letting other people see it (not censorship).
I doubt we'll ever get everybody to agree on what counts as "censorship"; but, I don't think we need to either. Rather than arguing about what we think "censorship" ought to mean, it would do us good to pay more attention to how the word is actually used.
By law and government, many different kinds of speech/communication are suppressed and/or restricted–fraud, perjury, defamation, violent threats, conspiring to commit crimes, impersonating law enforcement or other government officials, unauthorised publication of confidential information (medical records, intimate images, nuclear launch codes), inciting imminent lawless action, practicing regulated professions (such as law or medicine) without the appropriate qualifications and licenses, the proverbial "shouting fire in a crowded theatre", encouraging vulnerable teenagers to commit suicide, etc, etc, etc. The vast majority of people agree with most (or even all) of these in principle, even though there are still disputes about them at the margins–indeed, most people would agree that the suppression of many of these kinds of speech is essential for society to function. Yet very few would call suppressing these kinds of speech "censorship"; why? Well, the word "censorship" is largely a pejorative term–you'll only call it "censorship" if you disagree with it. If you believe certain kinds of speech ought to be suppressed–as almost everybody does–by that very fact it can't be "censorship", that's the way most people use the word. Now, there probably do exist some people who will say "Yes, banning X is censorship, but I support it, that's the good kind of censorship"–but, those people are very much a minority, most people don't use the word that way.
Since we'll never be able to fully agree on what kinds of speech are justifiably suppressed, we'll never be able to fully agree on what counts as "censorship" either. However, I think a lot of these debates get derailed into pointless semantic squabbling, by people who appear unaware of the "it can only be censorship if you disagree with it" principle which governs how the majority of people use the word. Once you are aware of that fact, it becomes clear that debating what forms of speech suppression count as "censorship" is a distraction from the real issue – debating where to draw the line between the good cases of speech suppression and the bad cases of speech suppression.
Another issue underlying many of these definitional debates, is different views on the significance of the public-private distinction, the distinction between governments and private corporations. To some people, that distinction has immense ideological, philosophical, even moral significance – they believe that governments and private corporations are fundamentally different kinds of entities, and very different standards should be used in judging them. Others think that governments and large corporations have many similarities; that even if there are some fundamental differences between them in theory (although even that is disputed), those theoretical differences have far less relevance in practice; that they should be judged by fundamentally the same standards – to these people, what matters is what is being done, not whether the public or private sectors are doing it. The first school of thought is naturally attracted to government-centric definitions of "censorship", such that "censorship by the private sector" becomes definitionally impossible; the second school of thought is instead attracted to definitions of "censorship" which are neutral to the government-vs-corporations distinction, so "censorship by the private sector" is entirely conceivable.
I think, once again, too much time is wasted by approaching this as a debate over the correct definition of a word, rather than focusing on the underlying philosophical differences. Inevitably, people with radically different philosophical starting points are almost inevitably going to adopt different definitions of key words, and it is impossible to answer "whose definition is right" without first answering "whose philosophy is right". Since philosophical disputes are notoriously unresolvable, we are never going to agree on the definitions either, so we might as well just all stop arguing about the later. At least the philosophical debates, even if unresolvable, have some profound significance, for how we ought to live our lives and organise our societies, for very Truth and Goodness themselves; the same cannot be said for debates over how to define a word.
Yes, it is being censored, because in most parts of said faraway land there is a total restriction of content. How about "you can't criticise the government anywhere, but we'll let you do it when you're alone inside your house, but only in the bathroom with locked doors, so it's not a 'total' restriction." Yes, this is censorship, and different from "well, this private company will restrict your message to the public on it's own platform because it goes against its policy, but you're free to publish your message on your own blog, write your own book, shout it out in the public square, etc."
> Yes, it is being censored, because in most parts of said faraway land there is a total restriction of content.
Suppose instead, that the law said it was a crime to publicly criticise the government on weekends; but, Monday to Friday, government-critical speech is fully allowed. That's not a case of "most parts... there is a total restriction": the restriction only applies 28.57% of the time.
But, on the contrary, if a government deliberately subjects certain points of view to restrictions which it does not impose on others, that still counts as censorship – even if the restrictions are not total, even if they don't rise to the level of "most places" or "most times".
Is a private corporation doing the same thing "censorship" as well? That's a perennial debate. But I don't think looking at restriction-vs-suppression, total-vs-partial restriction, differing degrees of restriction, etc, is very useful in resolving that debate. Whatever the correct conclusion to that debate may be, I don't think it is going to be based on those kinds of distinctions.
>If you, a consumer, are making the decision then it's not censorship. If some company, government, organization, school, etc is making the decision then it is censorship.
That seems too strong, what about curation or editorial discretion? The NYT deciding not to publish my op-ed screed about the lizard people isn't censorship, it's just how you run a good news agency.
I was a fan of Joe Rogan going back to News Radio. The thing that turned me off him was seeing a clip where he's hanging out with this other comedian (I forget the guy's name) who is boasting about how he used to deny female comedians stage time at a comedy club he managed unless they gave him a blowjob. Rogan's laughing at this in the clip. That's "genuinely creepy" in my view.
I wouldn't say I'm a fan, frankly I do not understand how people can sit through 3 hour interviews. He's just clearly a nice guy who means well, he's not dangerous or extreme, and his vibe is very anti-establishment.
I'd love to believe that, I'd be glad to find out I was mistaken. Do you have a link to, like, a video of Joe Rogan or Joey Diaz (I looked it up) saying that it was a bit? The search results I'm getting are all media outrage pieces.
So, you're saying that if I, as the CEO of a private company choose, for example, to host certainn people or certain products on my platform, it's censorship?
Strongly disagree.
At the government level, I might agree - but not with private companies.
no, but it does materially differ from censorship of a state.
No one is making Joe Rogan illegal. They are mad Spotify is paying for his nonsense.
If Spotify stopped paying him, nothing would materially change for his listeners. Unless Spotify went so far as to ban his Libsyn from their systems, they'd still be able to listen, for free, on Spotify. Even if they did that weird action, people would be able to listen from any number of podcatchers.
Until private companies decide to remove some individual from payment processing services, and private cloud providers stopped hosting their content and so on.
When nearly everything is private, so is censorship.
We also break up monopolies, so no one company can control the fate of their consumers, partners, contractors, etc.
I’m sure you’ve seen the signs at local shops saying they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. It’s an inconvenience if you get kicked out but you don’t have a right to the provider of your choosing in the US unless you were denied solely based on your status in a “protected class” (race, gender, over 65, etc.).
It’s the free market at work and if it’s not working other solutions will pop up if there’s enough demand.
Parler? Yeah they had a single hosting provider (AWS) and were in two app stores (Apple & Android). I believe the app could still be installed directly on phones through downloading, just not through the app stores.
So yeah, they (and their users) were inconvenienced, but they agreed to the terms and conditions of these providers.
It's kind of like if you have a restaurant and you violate the terms of your lease (or your lease has no guarantee of future occupancy). The landlord can kick you out, and it'll be a huge inconvenience to move.
I think the lesson is that if you want to do something a little edgy, self-host or find an off-shore host with terms and conditions you're comfortable with. Or, if this keep happening enough, new hosting companies will start up that have fewer terms and conditions. But the big providers are going to be the most strict and care the least about your unique situation and your infinitesimal contribution to their bottom line.
What? I kind of get that some censorship can be illegal. But if I privately choose to think that the views of X are idiotic, and kick them away from me because of that, that's my call. That's not censorship, that's me choosing.
As someone else implied, the private company can do as it please (within the law), and if getting chucked off the platform is a problem, then there is a monopoly problem to be dealt with, not a censorship problem.
If those choices are made purely because some popular opinions are popular but outside the overton window of your particular political party, then there's a problem.
I think a good point to make regarding this is that no opinion can ever be valid or invalid. Facts can be valid or invalid, and must be supported by evidence to be valid, but opinions just exist. One can be proven, the other can't.
You can personally think someone's opinion is stupid, or amazing, or whatever adjective you want to throw in, but it can never be "valid" or "invalid." Saying someone has an "invalid" opinion is just joining into the tribalism that people so love.
I personally try to ignore most people's opinions just to "filter out the noise" as you said. I try to drill into the facts, but that can be very challenging, because even factually accurate data can be misrepresented into an opposite opinion.
You are missing a third category: argument. That is to say a series of deductions starting from facts and sometimes values. The values might be opinions, but often attempts are made to use widely held opinions such that agreement can be assumed. Also facts are much harder to come by than one might think. We have data from observation and experiment and derive models and conclusions … and many call those results facts. But they are only probabilistic facts - one can assign a likelihood to their truth but full certainty is rare. Thus we must rely on rational dissection of argument to identify the most likely facts of rather than starting from some pool of known truths.
If someone arrives at opinion X by epistemologically faulty observations of the world or by eating up logical fallacies do you still think their opinion cannot be said to be invalid?
Nope, you can think their opinion is wrong, but again, opinions themselves can't be wrong/right/valid/invalid as they are not factual in any sense of the word.
Opinions are not facts and facts are not opinions. But it truly does get hard to distinguish.
Lets take an examples.
> The world is flat.
That isn't an opinion, that is a "factual statement" that is wrong. No matter how they want to phrase it or look at it, there is evidence that the earth indeed is not flat.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
> Green is better than blue.
This is an opinion, because it's based on personal preference.
A good way to try and distinguish is "can this claim be verified." Opinions cannot be verified, as they are based on personal experience / feelings / thoughts. Facts can have measurable data that will support / deny them.
>This is an opinion, because it's based on personal preference.
"I consider Mr. X a bad person" is also an opinion (notice it's not "Mr. X is a bad person"), but most people would have that opinion due to previous observations about Mr. X, not due to some immaterial thing going on inside their heads that has nothing to do with the world as it is.
That opinion is/should be changeable based on further evidence.
Experience/feelings/thoughts are based in the mind's interaction with reality. Sure some opinions are just a reflection of whatever internal mechanism is going on inside their heads, but lots of other opinions are not.
> "I consider Mr. X a bad person" is also an opinion
No, it's a fact (claim).
“Mr. X is a bad person” is an opinion, but “I consider...” is a fact claim about an opinion.
> but most people would have that opinion due to previous observations about Mr. X, not due to some immaterial thing going on inside their heads that has nothing to do with the world as it is.
No, they think that (or not) because of the interaction between experience and lower-level value functions, not experience alone.
That's some quality nit-picking (which IMO is rather enjoyable) but it doesn't really address what I put forward does it?
Thinking "Mr. X is a bad person" is still subject to external experiences and should be re-evaluated if given further evidence.
If it can be re-evaluated if given further evidence, surely the initial opinion was invalid?
> they think that (or not) because of the interaction between experience and lower-level value functions, not experience alone.
"Experience" entails an interaction with inner values for humans - you can't really separate experience from the inner values without cutting off the nervous system from it... at which point you can't call it experiencing something anymore.
> Opinions cannot be verified, as they are based on personal experience / feelings / thoughts. Facts can have measurable data that will support / deny them.
You can go down the rabbit hole with logical arguments and fallacies trying to neatly categorize things into "facts" and "opinions", but it's not that easy IMO :)
For example, I could say "The world is flat" and you could provide all the evidence you want and I could simply say I don't trust the evidence, or your data or your measurement devices. After all there certainly have been "facts" with "evidence" that have been disproven over time as new measurable data was uncovered. I could choose to not believe your evidence while I wait for more sufficient evidence in infinitum. Even 99.9999% confidence still leaves room for doubt.
"I think therefor I am" or simply "it thinks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum), is the closest thing to a "fact" that I've heard. Beyond that statement you have to make a leap of faith somewhere, even to believe the Earth is round.
> A UFO crashed at Roswell.
> This is claiming a fact, but we can't know for sure because we don't have reliable evidence either way.
> He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
So, wether a UFO crashed at Roswell or not isn't really that interesting unless someone somewhere has evidence.
But practically, I think it's possible to organize content into "productive theories" and "unproductive theories", which is again still subjective. But a "productive theory" would mean that I have enough confidence where I can use the theory to get a useful or expected result.
For example, I don't care if the Earth is "factually" round or not, but I have enough confidence from my interpretation and trust in the collected data about the shape of the Earth that I can build a large-scale reflecting pool that doesn't overflow and program a satellite to not crash back down to the ground. I think a lot of people call these things "facts", but it doesn't mean I have 100% confidence or claim to understand the entire situation, it just means I have enough information to be successful.
This just doesn't make sense to me. If an opinion involves factual information it can be proven or disproven. Facts and opinions are not mutually exclusive.
An "opinion" that is clearly in opposition to a fact certainly has very little value, and I would consider it invalid. I'm not saying someone doesn't have the right to a useless, proven-wrong opinion, but the value of any of their words will be near-zero in my eyes.
Not all opinions are equal, not all opinions are valid or represent truth.
Some opinions may be purely subjective and not even involve any kind of truth or fact statement ("X tastes good") but those opinions have very little value overall. Not completely useless, but not far from it
I personally feel we're accelerating towards a future where little thought, time, effort, or trust is given to anything factual and opinion somehow is the holy grail (especially the tragic idea that all opinions are somehow on equal footing) and I think we'll be worse off for it
> If an opinion involves factual information it can be proven or disproven. Facts and opinions are not mutually exclusive.
Facts and opinions are indeed mutually exclusive.
A fact is a statement that can be supported to be true or false by data or evidence. An opinion is a personal expression of a person’s feelings or thoughts that may or may not be based in data.
> An "opinion" that is clearly in opposition to a fact certainly has very little value, and I would consider it invalid.
Opinions cannot be wrong/right as they are personal to everyone. Opinions can indeed have value, but that again would be your opinion of their opinion. It's not your fact of their opinion. Now if they are claiming something that can or can't be proven such as "the world is flat" that isn't an opinion, that is them trying to claim a fact, and that's a personal failing to not differentiate.
> I personally feel we're accelerating towards a future where little thought, time, effort, or trust is given to anything factual and opinion somehow is the holy grail (especially the tragic idea that all opinions are somehow on equal footing) and I think we'll be worse off for it
I think we are worse off for judging opinions as facts as well. But here's the thing.... that's my opinion not my fact. I can't myself produce measurable data that says we are or aren't worse off, so it's an opinion. Personally I also think that news media / trusted sources for information should properly label opinion vs fact and be able to back up their facts with data.
Perhaps not valid or invalid, but surely an opinion can vary in value to you personally, perhaps even in value to society.
An opinion from a stranger on the internet, is of fairly low value, because you can't determine what weight to put behind that individuals opinion. You don't know if they've been thinking about this problem for months, or if they just clanged together an opinion right then and there, or if their opinion was fed to them via some youtuber they watch, or any other number of ways people come to an opinion.
Whereas with books and even people within your community, it's usually a lot easier to discern or research whether or not their opinion was derived from great thought, facts and experience. I will value the opinions in a book about engineering from the chief mechanic of an F1 team for example, there's reason to think they've given the topic a great deal of attention.
> Perhaps not valid or invalid, but surely an opinion can vary in value to you personally, perhaps even in value to society.
Fully agree.
I just get tired of seeing people claim that someone's opinion is wrong because they have some other view point that contradicts their opinion. People also intentionally blur the lines to try and get support for their argument, to me claiming valid/invalid on an opinion is one of the methods I see fairly often.
> Suppose I choose to personaly "censor" and stop paying attention to Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, reddit and that crappy podcast on Spotify, after I understand they're just cesspools of ignorance, childish memes and tribalism.
There are a lot of stuff that is ok for you to do personally, but that large companies doing at scale becomes problematic.
For example, you do facial recognition every day. As you walk through the store, you recognize friends and people you have met before. However, if a company sent bots with facial recognition everywhere, that would be problematic.
I would also bet that your close friends and people you invite into your home, tilt very heavily toward the same racial background and sociology-economic status as you. That may be ok for you, is very problematic for a large company.
In the same way, you “censoring” something is not a big deal. You can also ban entire authors from your home and it still would not be a big deal. But when a large multibillion dollar company with millions to billions of users does it, it is a big deal.
> Bradbury predicted that people, disturbed by confusing or challenging ideas, might one day demand censorship for themselves and protection from any information that pierced the veil of their own simplified reality.
> In a society now dominated by reassuringly reductive tweets and memes, where supposedly learned people choose to boycott long-form podcasts, encourage publishers to ditch books by controversial authors, or lean on streaming providers to severe ties with comedians and other artists, this prediction from 1953 sounds eerily familiar.
Assuming this is the underlying thesis of the article, this is a simplistic view of information.
In real world, it's not always obvious how to distinguish "controversial" with "crackpot". With today's ease of publishing, there's plenty of information on every crackpot theory, which requires a practically impossible amount of research from the individual to systematically falsify. Some of them are harmless (flat earth), some of them are potentially dangerous (e.g. ivermectin).
Spread of potentially dangerous information is a lose-lose situation. If let spread, it will cause (on large enough scale) harm, if not, the popoluation will scream at censhorship.
The related link to a Don’t Look Up screenshot in the article page is actually very telling - in that movie, the audience knows for certain that the asteroid/comet will destroy earth. In reality, it's not so black and white, and doomsday theories are a dime a dozen.
Articles like this don't help at all to shape a cognitive approach to modern excess of information.
Your best example of a dangerous theory is Ivermectin? How many deaths has that idea caused?
That's the problem with censorship/cancellation/deplatforming. The standards are very loose and selective. You say that a theory about Ivermectin is dangerous without a shred of evidence. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe people died. But I doubt it's of any significant scale. Probably it's just snake oil.
But how many morning TV hosts repeat the latest health food craze that's just as dubious? Why aren't those labeled "dangerous"?
The answer is that it's about politics, authority, and group identity; not health. You are really saying that JR has identified with the wrong tribe, and so it's time to expel him. And the fact that doctors (currently) agree with you is the justification to do so.
Life is complex and nuanced. Relying on authorities and groupthink works most of the time, but I'm glad not everyone does so or we would be in a dystopia.
Saying JR is a crackpot and ignoring him is fine, and that's probably where the smart money will be. But trying to ostracize him is not OK.
> Your best example of a dangerous theory is Ivermectin? How many deaths has that idea caused?
I'm guessing that OP was referring to the idea of Ivermectin as a cure for COVID. For example, choosing not to get vaccinated or wear a mask but to have a plan to take Ivermectin if they contract COVID and then contracting COVID and spreading it to others and possibly succumbing to it.
But how dangerous is that idea, really? How many people heard the idea, and didn't get vaccinated because of it? If this idea weren't put out there, how many of those people would have just found some other reason to not get vaccinated?
It's just a scare tactic to get us to accept censorship/deplatforming/cancellation as a legitimate practice. Drugs are scary. Terrorists are scary. Now podcasters are scary.
Looks like we've already decided to give up our values, and we're just looking for any flimsy excuse to justify it.
We seem to be replaying the Early Modern Age conversation about the printing press. The printing press was considered dangerous precisely because individuals and identities other than the Church could easily publish their heresies and the low-born could publish pamphlets attacking the Sovereign and Peers of the Realm.
In the Islamic world, the Caliph (who, at the time, was identical with the Ottoman Sultan) banned the use of the printing press by Muslims in 1485. (Unbelievers could print whatever they wanted in their languages and for their exclusive consumption.)
If you look at the entire history of suppressing misinformation, you will see that:
a) in the long run, freer societes did better,
b) the club of the censors seems to contain all the nastiest regimes and there seems to be a clear correlation between nastiness of a regime and its eagerness to control information; for that reason alone, I wouldn't want to be caught dead in the same company,
c) it was fairly common that the kind of information censored overlapped significantly with the kind of information that people in power didn't like.
I think this is more akin to a king choosing to not be a patron of someone at the time (Spotify paying $100 million), not a king censoring criticism of himself, even if not becoming a patron of his ideological enemies has an arguably similar effect to censoring them.
To be clear, I don't take any position about how to handle "ease of publishing" (I may have used inappropriate terminology, as I was referring to publishing of ideas from individuals). To me, it's an open problem.
I agree that it's useful to compare the public-information environments (1) shortly after the widespread adoption of the printing press and (2) shortly after the widespread adoption of the internet.
In the printing press example, what happened was that a hierarchy of trust developed. Publishing houses and periodicals in a wide variety of fields (science, news reporting, etc.) developed reputations for being trustworthy. Sometimes they abused that trust (or were simply mistaken), but as you note, in freer societies, these issues were corrected by other publications. At its best, this development of trust and accountability amounts to a society-wide conversation about what is true and what is useful.
With the internet, we're at an inflection point in our society where we can decide at what level we want these trust hierarchies to exist, and how the conversation should develop. Should social media platforms be allowed to be an active participant in this conversation? There is a contingent (well-represented on HN) that says "no, social media should be forced to carry whatever speech its users post." (Though generally very few people say they should be forced to leave up spam or pornography, if they want to remove it.)
I personally think that social media platforms should be allowed to participate in the society-level conversation by deciding what level of (what they deem to be) misinformation is allowed on their platform. When (not if) these platforms mess up, people will complain on other platforms (which still exist, despite protestrations to the contrary). To the extent that the largest platforms reject certain types of speech, it should be up to the proponents of those ideas to prove them out, and get society on board with their ideas. This is how things have worked in the past - small, upstart printing presses published pamphlets and try to disrupt the orthodoxy. If they can't, they fail.
But... if we're going to have social media platforms (and not just the internet at large) serve as the public square (and thus force them to bow out of the larger debate on what is and is not misinformation), then we need to start having some real conversations about what sort of stuff the platforms must carry, and how we make those decisions. Presumably a government body would have to make decisions about what the platforms can't remove. How should that body be set up, and how should it make its decisions?
>In the Islamic world, the Caliph (who, at the time, was identical with the Ottoman Sultan) banned the use of the printing press by Muslims in 1485. (Unbelievers could print whatever they wanted in their languages and for their exclusive consumption.)
[...]
>If you look at the entire history of suppressing misinformation, you will see that:
There are many people who argue that even having a discussion about side-loading apps is dangerous.
If you let some authority tell everyone what’s dangerous to talk about you give them absolute power. That’s far more dangerous than people taking some well understood medicine when they might not need it.
There seems to be a non-trivial anti-semetic component to at least one version of the flat earth conspiracy. It seems there's not one coherent view that all flat-earther's follow, which is not surprising at all. But I would feel confident in saying that the part where the earth is flat is just a springboard for the more insidious conspiracies people conjure up.
I wouldn't say it's a gateway drug, but rather a filter that selects for people willing to accept conspiracies that last hundreds of years and involve a million conspirators, across every advanced society, for unclear goals.
This assertion is made about many "fringe" social/political sentiments (or alternatively, some version of "they're trolling you"), but I think people frequently misunderstand how many practical similarities there are between one promoting these things "ironically" vs sincerely, outside of one's own mind.
A whole lot of ink to be spilled complaining about the movement of the overton window. Substantive discussions of sensitive topics are, if anything, more common, widespread, and participated in than ever.
You only hear bellyaching from people who feel that the consensus on those issues has shifted away from their point of view. Note that this article spends more time bemoaning the mere deplatforming of the (at best, bimbo level) podcast the Joe Rogan Experience (which hasn't even happened!) than the outright banning of books in Texas schools.
This guy needs to pull his head out of his ass, in short. Controversial, complicated conversations are happening _everywhere and all the time_ in the modern world. I would bet solid money that the open discussion of taboo ideas is _more_ common now than at any point in history.
As I understand it, deplatforming is a larger concept than "make sure everything ever said by someone readily available". Publicly curating the content leaves a trail to obtain that content, if you are interested. You are free to disagree.
Yea, I understand your point and I don't think Joe Rogan has been completely "deplatformed". I'm sure it's still possible to find the books after a book burning, or more, book burning doesn't mute the author so you could find them and reap their content via conversation. My point is that his content is being censored to some degree. In addition, it seems more damaging to only censor some of his content because most people won't even know what they are missing and why.
I'm not pulling for Joe Rogan in particular. I used to listen to some of his podcasts when it was on youtube. But, I'm absolutely against this type of corporate censorship by content stewards. Yes, I think every business has and should have the right, but I don't like seeing it and choose to push back wherever I can.
> My point is that his content is being censored to some degree.
To the degree that's it's no longer called censorship. Just like an author sells the rights of their books to a publisher. The publisher can publish or not, it's their choice. If you don't want to give someone that kind of control, write it into the contract that they give up the rights to anything not published within 1 week of creation for example. But it isn't censorship if you willingly sell the rights to your content and then are retroactively unhappy with their use (or non-use) of it. At that point it's the publisher's decision and it's just called content curation.
Rogan got $100M and in exchange he apparently gave up rights. He thought it was a fair deal at the time, maybe he still does. It's just business.
You're missing my point. Call it anything you like. I'm not saying Spotify doesn't have the right to do whatever is in that contract (which I assume is anything they want) with the content. By the same token, that doesn't mean I have to approve of them doing it. I'm a paying customer. They'd probably like to keep receiving my monthly payment. I think they're spineless. I guess for now I'll just complain a bit to the ether and if they start removing content I actually listen to, I'll drop them. Imagine if they started removing hip-hop from their catalog? All that misogynistic, violent, gangsta shit a lot of us listen to. They won't, because currently it isn't in the cross-hairs of the politically woke (I guess it had it's time in the 90's. I'm glad it wasn't completely censored/banned like many politically woke of the time wanted). But we'll see how things play out in the future. The fact that self-claimed liberals can't at least acknowledge the danger of censoring (or whatever the hell you want to call it) content for political reasons is... disappointing.
> can't at least acknowledge the danger of censoring (or whatever the hell you want to call it) content for political reasons is... disappointing.
Because it’s not. It’s the wrong word for it.
If Barnes and Noble decides to stop carrying a book but you can buy it on Amazon, the book isn’t being censored. You are still free to buy it. And you’re free to start your own book shop that sells it. Censorship isn’t the right to not be slightly inconvenienced. Censorship is the total suppression of access to content.
Private, non-monopolistic companies are under no obligation to indulge your specific content preferences. And yes, Spotify adds and removes artists and podcasts all the time as they curate their catalog.
Also, Rogan sold the rights to his content! If you don’t want to give up control about what is available where, don’t sell it. You can’t sell a painting and then complain about where it’s hung, or not hung. The buyer can burn it if they want. When you sell you give up control.
I’m any event I don’t think the right or the left needs to play this game of who can claim they’re being repressed the most.
By the time something is actually censored, the rights wouldn’t have been sold and you won’t be able to find it or access it anywhere and then I’ll 100% call it censorship. Until then it’s just a race to be the victim.
> Note that this article spends more time bemoaning the mere deplatforming of the (at best, bimbo level) podcast the Joe Rogan Experience (which hasn't even happened!)
Not only he hasn't been censored, but the controversy actually comes from the fact Joe Rogan was promoted by Spotify who've signed a huge deal (we're talking about dozens of million dollar here) with Rogan!
I think hearing about the pushback against cancel culture is important just to know it's not as one-sided as it appears in parts of the Twitter sphere. I find it reassuring quite frankly.
As you say, plus the fact that this is Quillette, a publication founded in part to give a platform to writers on the topic of race and IQ. Their arguments against any sort of deplatforming are pernicious and self-serving.
I think it's important to note that in Bradburys book, that book burning was initially approved by all of society, by both politicial sides, factions and peoples as these first books were universally condemned. The subject matter of these horrid books were basically things that are today illegal in England today to own. Truely evil stuff. The initial book burning in that fictional history did not have critique, warning, criticisms or opponents. Everyone did it and wanted it.
I'd be happy to burn most of that kind of material, most of us here would also be eager book burners of that first wave also. That's partly why Bradbury's book is True and powerful.
Edits, answering the article a bit: The truth (obviously not the main message through) in the novel is not that people were led into ignorance or gently coaxed by technology, just the opposite: people will exclude and censor naturally, especially when they all agree.
> I'd be happy to burn most of that kind of material, most of us here would also be eager book burners of that first wave also. That's partly why Bradbury's book is True and powerful.
> Indeed, given the endless parade of imagined horribles one could conjure up for any policy decision, the slippery slope can easily become an argument for doing nothing at all. Yet act we do; as George Will once noted, 'All politics takes place on a slippery slope.'
> The slippery slope fallacy is committed only when we accept without further justification or argument that once the first step is taken, the others are going to follow, or that whatever would justify the first step would, in fact, justify the rest.
Because with each new book or set of books to be burned a decision has to be made that is similar to, but ultimately independent of the prior decisions. There is nothing stopping us from burning more books, just as there is nothing stopping us from not burning more books. The momentum is a factor, but it is not insurmountable, just like it's possible to moderate almost any behavior without resorting to either abstinence or addiction.
Point taken though that every addiction starts with breaking abstinence.
> Bradbury was right that people would choose self-censorship, led into ignorance by technological innovations that make open discourse and thought unpalatable. Were it a government that imposed such a rule, there would be an uproar, at least in Western societies. But gently coaxed by algorithms, people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect.
Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN. You can't have a sensible discussion on FB anymore, for instance, the place is made just for shouting.
While the situation here is better than elsewhere, don't be fooled. There's plenty of group think and (self) censorship going on around here too.
Give any human the ability to down vote and a reputation number, and comments will automatically converge to some kind of social standard.
HN is mostly filled with people with an interest in tech, finance, and getting rich off tech. That allows for deeper discussions on technical topics and startup finances, but when it comes to politics there's not that much difference between HN and your average subreddit.
Facebook is a "shouting into the void" platform, kind of like Twitter but without the length requirement. In my experience it's never been possible to have any kind of reasonable discussion on there.
Yeah I recognise some of that, but politically I see both lefty and righty opinions here, with a fair bit of nuance. You can also bring in concepts that an economics undergrad would know and people will recognise it, rather than act like you just made it up and ignore it, like it happens everywhere else. Basically I feel like a somewhat educated view is worthwhile to put forward here, rather than on FB where it really is just memes that work.
But you're right, some opinions are still more popular here than others, and some opinions are immediate karma bombs.
There's also aggressive pruning of anything not on topic and a much stricter code of behavior than a place like Reddit or Facebook. I think it's important to do, and while I've been on the wrong side of content removal before and I don't begrudge it at all, but I don't know how people could look at this community and think it's intrinsically better by being freer of censorship just because that censorship is higher brow.
Agreed. Not that there's any dearth of slap fighting on HN, but it always perplexes me when people on Twitter and r/programming talk about "the orange hellsite" as though the quality of HN isn't dramatically higher than any other sizable web forum or social media network.
I would like to argue that if you don’t consider this a place hostile, you might only feel that way because you are the audience that this site caters to. This is the sort of cognizant bubble-popping that is important to recognize.
(To be clear: I also think I have high quality discussions on HN… but only for certain subjects. Anyone who, for example, advocates for wealth taxes or wealth redistribution or any other positions that wealthy people and people interested in accumulating wealth don’t like often are not given the time of day to intelligently talk about their positions.)
I mean, it's less civil than real-world dialog, but it's a lot more civil than virtually any place else on the Internet. But it's not that "I'm the audience that this site caters to":
1. my opinions (with respect to technology or politics) have remained the same but their popularity with this site has ebbed and flowed, but relative civility hasn't fluctuated much
2. I can disagree with and be disagreed with civily here, while on Twitter disagreement is almost invariably hostile (yes, you can curate to a small degree)
3. there are people who agree with me on Twitter and Reddit who arrive by the worst conclusions and who are hostile toward people with whom I disagree
I suspect many of the people who hate HN are those who can't disagree civily--who feel like opinions they dislike must be censored or censured.
One of the structures of HN is also that unpopular opinions are also heavily downvoted which obscures them, both visually and algorithmically. (And then people heavily downvoted I see can often complain of rate-limiting.)This is not about civility but about whether or not the environment is structurally hostile to certain philosophical discussions, which I understand it might be if one’s opinion is, say, that billionaires are unethical. (I don’t believe this personally but I know I will never get an intellectual, good faith discussion on the subject here.)
As previously mentioned, I've argued the unpopular side of many arguments, and I've found HN to be eminently civil as far as Internet forums go. However, my standard is "civility" or "good faith" and not "people agree with me". I agree, however, that many of HN's critics share the latter standard (and thus are happier on far more toxic websites), but I think it's an awful standard if it can be called a standard at all.
> This is not about civility but about whether or not the environment is structurally hostile to certain philosophical discussions
It's not hostile to certain philosophical discussions. We've had many robust political and technological debates (including whether the wealthiest should pay more tax and so on), but that doesn't mean the unpopular view carries the day (indeed, my view point on this is probably the unpopular one on this forum, though not by very much).
Now speaking to your concern about which viewpoints get more upvotes, in my experience as a frequent dissenter and devil's advocate, I've found that you can do a lot more on this site to mitigate the unpopularity of your opinions by demonstrating good faith, showing that you understand counterarguments, and communicating clearly. If you make everything hostile and tribal, you're going to have a bad time, which I think is a feature of this site (and which is also very likely the motivation behind so many of the HN=bad types of comments).
I think a lot of people congregate elsewhere because they don't like HN (specifically because HN moderation and norms limit toxicity compared with proggit and Twitter).
> people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect.
Isn't it ironic that that concept was already well know and had been discussed for decades, but we keep falling for it and encourage the new generations to "become what they want to be" regardless of the consequences while we also help them to chose meaningless fights against what is simply annoying to us, but harmless in general, reducing the public discourse to bubbles of anger that can only lead to less dialogue and more divisions?
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881
> Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN.
HN is one of the few places where I regularly upvote comments that I disagree with, because they've frame an issue in a way I hadn't considered, or add new information to the discussion. As President Obama once said, "We can disagree without disagreeable".
Sometimes I upvote just so I can read the faded comment. It’s seriously annoying and I think a sentiment gauge based on basic emotions would work much better.
I've noticed that people are increasingly incapable of having nuanced opinions. There is no more gray, it's either black or white.
For example, crypto is either a new dawn for humanity or it's a useless scam whose only purpose it to destroy the planet. There is no in-between. Same for the vaccine or anything related to politics.
Some websites are better than others of course, but still, I've seen an increasing amount of this kind of extremely polarized opinions even on websites I thought were "safe" from this lack of nuance. Every website is a memetic warzone. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder more and more often whether the person I'm replying to is capable of rational thought or if they're bots, paid actors, or if they're simply unable to understand that there is a reason why "the other side" thinks the way it does (aside from reductive, simple answers).
It's bad. It wasn't like this before, and people being fed custom realities by algorithms was certainly one of the many reasons this is happening.
Another issue is what is going on in US, that for good or worse affects everyone else on this planet. Once the current civil war in US will be over, rest would relax and adapt to new reality.
And another issue with coments is that commenting is not communication - in a way, that it is not talk with other person. Comment to communication is the same communication, that lamp post is for a dog - where he leaves mark by pissing on it. So, this is the sad reality - we are dogs here leaving marks on internet territory. And that is the closest form to "communication". If you want proper communication, get a friend and have a tea or wine and have a proper talk. Here it is simply not possible.
>Middle grounders typically only argue that the poles are wrong and don't in any way show how their own opinions are correct.
That's incredibly reductive, to say the least. Having a middle ground means believing that both poles are wrong in some aspects and right in others, but it's up to the one arguing to actually explain his position, and if they "don't in any way show how their own opinions are correct" then it's simply due to their own poor arguing skills.
I'm on one side of a controversial topic, yet I understand and can sympathize with the other side, and I find it impossible to explain to people on my own side. They are emotionally committed to viewing the other side as immoral monsters.
It's something I've seen a lot all over the internet in the last few years, but the reason it stops any insightful discussion is that people think that if you disagree with them you must be on the other extreme. After they decided that, there's no way to convince them you're not.
This only leads to people getting more and more extreme with their opinions, kinda like if you're not an extremist nobody will listen to you. I'm mostly talking about politics here but the crypto example you gave applies perfectly too, everyone is either a poorfag seething because they missed the train or an evil capitalist that has a huge farm of computers mining 24/7 that he calls his polution machine to make money.
>Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN
HN is extremely restrictive in what you're allowed to say without getting flagged. At the same time, discussion in the allowed spectrum are indeed of higher quality. Unless you fit in the narrow spectrum constant self-censorship is required. The design encourages this more than reddit, because unless you manually enable showdead, rejected comments are gone instead of collapsed. Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny.
"If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm. Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus"."
I remember this one because I wrote a semi-long comment. The story was getting upvotes fast. I look a while later - flagged, gone, title edited to be less interesting. It doesn't show [flagged] now (because it's old?) but you can see the submitter complaining it was flagged.
>Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny.
I'm not so sure about "inverting votes" but yesterday there was a thread where multiple people claimed to have been "shаdоwbаnned" from voting.
It explains more, than what I have discovered. And sadly that makes NH another "shit place"(no offence to moderators), where bots can thrive and where I have no intention to invest(and care) and where for me HN is just another nicotine patch, that is replacing FB.
Unfortunately, even in HN there is a lot of auto-censorship.
I have seen several articles make it to the front page and promptly disappear, flagged to death, just because they were against woke culture or the predominant points of the left.
That quote jumped out at me too, but ... isn't it a mischaracterization of Bradbury? In the book, isn't book-censorship imposed by the government?
I think the distinction is important b/c in so many conversations about de-platforming, one side wants to express firm commitment to the first amendment but retain the distinction that it applies only to states.
It's a both/and. The government takes advantage of the popular sentiment. And it's not directly censoring ideas, but forms of media, no matter the ideas they contain.
I'd be careful with this assessment. HN isn't immune to these effects. Especially with the approach towards quality. Maybe that's just me, but I often end up not submitting comments on HN, or reducing them*). This self-censorship has multiple reasons:
First, I often ask myself if the comment adds some value to the discussion; or if it just ends up being one of these fly-over comments that's just the tenth repetition of the same musing/opinion/question/thought.
Second, if I evaluate that some discussion ends up being to polarized or too exhausting (if I make an argument, I should be prepared to defend it and not just run away), I don't hit that reply button as well.
That's not to say that this is inherently evil. Do we need low quality comments? I think no. Should I/others always write ten paragraph comments instead of condensing their thoughts? Doesn't sound like an inherently bad idea, but maybe some things get lost/censored that way. And thanks to a lot of effort put into productive discussion by most people here nice discussion can be had, but to pick some examples: I myself would still be careful joining a discussion about RMS here, or on some areas of politics (e.g. taxing), or on vaccination (let alone something complex as mandated vaccination). Even though I think that some of these should be had (not necessarily on HN).
Yes, FB is worse and, to stick to the current theme, dead-end discussion about vaxing are probably running rampant there and I am happy that I only get some rare glimpses of that when a friend is acting like Don Quijote and posting on it on our Discord; but essentially I think that's a dangerous whataboutism.
*) I was actually considering cutting the comment there, even after writing the rest. But I think some more elaboration doesn't hurt in this case ;-)
The recent Joe Rogan extravaganza brought this all out as well. I know nothing about virology. I listened to that controversial virologist on his podcast and still know so little. But then on HN it seems there are apparently numerous experts on the subject, or so they think, who are dead sure censoring of the dangerous Dr. Malone is necessary. It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter, but with a better vocabulary.
That's to be expected with any divisive topic on the internet, which that one certainly is.
> It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter
The active ingredient there is the word 'seemed'. If you look closer and deeper, you'll see that HN is an experiment in a completely different sort of site—not just from Twitter, but from all the other major ones. This is partly because of the values it was founded with*, but equally because of the initial conditions of its design—primarily the fact that it's non-siloed, meaning there are no follow lists or social graphs or any of the other devices that online communities use to partition themselves. That has profound effects.
* Primarily intellectual curiosity. Note: when I say HN was founded on that value I am not saying that it always, or even mostly, lives up to it. Just that it's in the DNA and that makes a difference.
To me NH is strictly a source for technological/programming news. I do not comment on them, because I do not care what others(or bots) think, but my interest is about learning from that topic as much as possible, without noise.
Anything else is free game. Also, I want to create a bot, that would act like me and piss off others - as many as possible, so I do not have to do it by myself(this is a self-deprecating sarcastic joke). Or probably not - I get bored very quickly and would find more interesting things to do.
The issue with covid is disturbing in many levels. Apparently this is something that government(s) have decided that discussions and even constructive criticism is sabotage of government(and they decided to do something about covid, because not doing anything would be worse - for government and bureaucracy - not for individual people, who in majority survive through covid). So, there are no equal tribal opinions in first place - only "extremists-terrorists" that are in opposition to government VS religious patriots, who feel comfortable, that they do not need to think for themselves and somebody else is taking care of them and for them. So, quite logically NH can't be in opposition in this religious-patriotic fervour. And this is a stark reminder, that you and only you have to think for yourself(and not government) - because that is what your brains are for.
Note that, when you live in the world we do, you are exposed nigh permanently to people expressing irrational/bitter thoughts and people expressing thoughts irrationally/bitterly, even if you avoid the platforms of the major offenders. Our brains strongly tend to think relatively, so when we see somebody express those same or adjacent thoughts, but without the irrationality or bitterness, it is almost automatic to interpret it in the same light that we are used to. This can cause the afterimage of "internet shithole" to hover over every public platform we visit, assuming it's not hyper-localized to one's preferred circles. Further, this effect is inherently more dramatic for opinions that are counter to our own, so the image is not just "internet shithole", but "internet shithole of the opposite social/political leaning to me", even if that leaning is actually small, non-existent, or even opposite to our perception.
I.e. when you encounter somebody saying "I think X", if they are merely doing so as an unsubstantive or hostile expression of tribalism nine times out of ten, then you may miss the tenth person who is actually making a reasonable point.
And, on a less broadly applicable note, when public health is a direct consequence, the topic gets even muddier and even more emotional than usual, understandably.
Science vs. did a good episode on why that episode was dangerous bullshit, and unlike Rogan they cite sources/talk to experts in the field
That's not to say laypeople shouldn't be able to interview potentially controversial subjects, but to my mind preventing a celebrity from using their platform to spread information when they're not doing any good faith investigation as to whether that information is accurate is not equivalent to censorship
He’s one of the few “mainstream” talk show hosts who is willing to invite otherwise censored guests and get people with differing opinions/viewpoints. I’m no Rogan fan but the hysteria is mind boggling.
I’m also shocked and saddened that this view of consensus science is being shoved down people’s throats. That is literally the antithesis of science. Appeal to authority has no business standing in the way of questioning and presenting evidence.
I used to listen to Rogan quite a bit until I realised what his format was, if he has reasonable guests on he'll find something to challenge them over (great), if he has 'controversial' guests on he'll let them mostly talk unchallenged. I used to think that was because he was easily redirected by bullshit artists, but after the anti-vaccine/ivermectin reporting I think it's more likely he just agrees with them and wants them to have a bigger platform
Again I'm not arguing he should be censored or that any differences in opinion should be excised from the public domain. But giving people equal platforms lends them equal credibility to laypeople and the general public, which is why I think a good faith effort to interview controversial subjects would include a lot of disclaimers/warnings/replies from experts which Rogan makes no attempt to do
And so what if he does believe it? Is it so hard to believe that the continually moving efficacy or risk profile of a novel medical treatment is emergent? Less then a year ago fully vaccinated meant 90% efficacy. Today you need two more boosters and the scheduling is being changed to avoid heart inflammation. In the spring Rogan was taking horse dewormer, today there are several studies showing positive outcomes from ivermectin. I’m not sure Rogan is responsible for any more disinformation than mainstream sources and I’d argue _if_ his guests are misinformed, their suggestions are less dangerous than other, louder sources.
In many settings professionals can be fired, lose their credentials/licence for giving bad advice or not doing due diligence. Compared to Rogan most of them have much less impact on other people, why should he be held to a lower standard of responsibility/accountability?
Mostly only for certain definitions of "grumping" that are poisonous to substantive conversation. I find on HN that [user] moderation is largely irrelevant to the subject, which is a small miracle even despite its imperfect application.
Do you have an example? Contested topics can be flagged by users, but it's possible to appeal to HN moderators. Has anyone been banned from HN for a topic? Over the last couple of years, HN has been one of the few places where debate was even possible.
The site doesn't ban, the users gang downvote you into oblivion for political views unpopular with west coast liberal values. Oh well - 95% of posts aren't political anyway. And other than that, the discussions are fantastic.
Are you being a weasel about the word "ban"? Do you place users in a special status where their comments are hidden by default and they are subject to strict rate limits based on things they say? Yes, of course. And I can't link people to examples, because HN hides the comments in question from everyone but me. You know that.
We generally tell people we're banning them and why, but there are two major exceptions: spammers and serial trolls. By serial troll I mean someone who we banned at least once already and who shows up again and again with new accounts to break the site guidelines, knowing perfectly well what they're doing. When people do that, it no longer makes sense to post a "we're banning you" comment every time—they've already made quite clear that they don't want to use HN as intended. Your account, if I'm not mistaken, is very much in the latter category. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, you've done it dozens of times by now. That's why we shadowban the new ones.
> Your account, if I'm not mistaken, is very much in the latter category.
You should be glad that someone cares enough to keep trying to administer medicine. The people who just went away when you made it clear that you were going to persistently treat them unfairly, they just consider you and other users unredeemable, lost, that trying to help you wasn't worth their time. It wouldn't be a good thing for you to actually win against the "serial trolls". Unenviable position, yours.
Did Huxley or Bradbury write essays about contemporary politics? Orwell wrote some fascinating ones that I think are more worth reading than 1984, and cover much of the same ground. In particular I'd recommend the essays "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" and "You and the Atom Bomb".
I've often thought a blend of Huxley and Bradbury is where we're at now, at least in the West.
People just want to live, with as little worry about their basic needs as possible. They don't much care how they get it, either. And that's why the ideas in all these three books are so easily carried out in reality.
I think peoples' willingness to be subjugated makes it easier to see the parallels between Huxley and Bradbury's worlds and our own, but I don't think they nailed the "Post-Truth" ethos quite as well as 1984 did. It appears that Orwell tragically overestimated people and assumed that it would require methodical violence to make his world a reality.
Also the parallels between Trump, deplorables, right, far-right, etc. and two minutes of hate is quite scary... Just that it extends over much longer period...
I'll be honest, I didn't expect the article about the anti-intellectualization of our culture to be veiled apologetics for Joe Rogan. It's not censorship to choose not to spend every moment discussing the basest topics that have already been belabored far beyond what they deserve.
If you want to argue that the potential harm of a large group of people other than yourself is fine, I won't censor you. Stand in your truth and hear what everyone else has to say about the matter. Considering only your own unpopular opinion while ignoring all others does not a philosopher make.
I think there is some interesting thoughts in this post but gets heavily muddied by the example and by the time difference of the when the original books were written vs how society operates. Yes history mimics itself but our systems are quite different than back then.
I do think that use Joe Rogan as the canonical example is difficult given how fraught his situation is. He almost serves as a de-facto source of information for large swatch of the population and does it for his own benefit intentionally exploiting information while washing his hands clean of any responsibility.
The biggest irony is that Fahrenheit 451 is almost as big a sneer at modern media as it's a paen to books. As he's discovering books, Montag concludes that it's the rubbish that's broadcast on the giant TVs that's depressing his wife, and ends up torching the TV instead...
I'm not sure Joe Rogan's podcast would escape Bradbury's flamethrower.
"we not only lose outdated and misguided opinions"
Those are some of the most valuable opinions to share. It's not great that people have such opinions, but to the extent that people do, it's much better to discuss them than suppress them.
And they need to be discussed in long form with subtlety and nuance, and free from judgement of the people that hold them.
If we suppress racist ideas, it doesn't mean everyone magically learned the real lessons. Even if racism becomes such a taboo that nobody ever engages in it again, if the real lessons aren't learned, it will manifest again. The definitions of race and racism will change, or it will take an unfamiliar form that we don't recognize because we don't truly understand it.
The solution is to keep an open dialogue with people who are sincerely trying to be good. And even with personalities that are insincere, but have sincere (misguided) followers. Or even people who are insincere at times but open up to discussion later.
Sure, at some point we have to say "this person is crazy and we don't have the time", but we shouldn't actively try to prevent others from hearing them.
I reject the notion that free speech is some kind of compromise where we allow bad ideas to be discussed only so we don't miss good ideas. No, we let bad ideas be discussed because it's good to discuss bad ideas.
Yeah, sure, it's definitely some type of dystopia where we're all forced to treat criticism against a $100 million podcaster as some fundamental human rights issue
And I got that idea from Bradbury, at one point--in my recollection of the book, I can't find the part I'm looking for--what I remember is the antagonist (Captain Beatty) saying there's ten million soldiers, but reporting it as one million is more impressive, so that's what's claimed. But a million was the magic number of the twentieth century. Now it's a billion.
So in my portfolio I describe an algorithm that beats the state of the art by a factor of a billion. It's a rough way of communicating it, it's not actually a fixed factor except in specific situations. And really it was about 1.07 billion. So, that's pure marketing--it's the truth, it will be faster by that much--but there's a reason it was about a billion and not more. I could have kept improving it, but it would have been counterproductive to its real purpose, which was talking about it to people and getting exposure as an algorithm writer. For those purposes, a factor of a trillion would have been much less impressive. I'd have to explain what a trillion is, it's such a big number you can't write it down because it's got twelve zeroes behind it, which confuses people. And it leads people to believe it wasn't a meaningful achievement, like I optimized something that didn't really matter.
So there you go, sometimes the oppressors in dystopias can have good insights.
Great thought, but I think the author has made a careless mistake. Most people "deplatformed" are being ejected from massive propaganda machine like Fox News or Spotify for being sex offenders and criminals, not for issues of "freedom of speech."
I'm surprised this is gaining traction here, because I think the key thing that Bradbury _didn't_ see, and which Wills brushes past, is that in Fahrenheit 451 they're burning books because the mental model of how ideas flow was still centered around print media with publishers/printers, one-writer-many-readers, etc. And no one in Fahrenheit talks about writing a book, producing ideas, really do they? (It's been a long time since I read it.)
The kind of interactive conversation we take for granted today, where anyone can post, and where the reactions of others are immediately visible and part of the experience of not just seeing but finding content, was understandably not foreseen by Bradbury in 1953. But now that we've arrived here, don't we need better and more up to date models for how to think about censorship? In particular, issues/mechanisms which aren't really central in my memory of Bradbury were:
- facticity: is deliberate misinformation a more legitimate target for suppression?
- equity among different types of actors: e.g. the FDA doesn't allow a manufacturer or distributor of Ivermectin to say that it is an effective Covid treatment. Should non-affiliated parties be able to say it, and be paid to say it?
- financial incentives for "inflammatory" (pun intended) content
Flattening it all to just the presence or absence of any mechanism of suppressing content, irrespective of who is doing it, how, or why I think actually hinders our ability to have the nuanced conversation which Wills would claim to be defending.
And if you _do_ want to talk about Bradbury's prescience, I think Joe Rogan is the wrong example to pick right now. There are plenty of contemporary examples of states or local school boards trying to ban concepts from the curriculum, or books, in a way which is a lot more directly aligned, and aren't weighed down by the same baggage.
> in Fahrenheit 451 they're burning books because the mental model of how ideas flow was still centered around print media with publishers/printers, one-writer-many-readers, etc.
Bradbury's model in Fahrenheit 451 is even more specific than that: the books are full of diverse intellectual ideas and the TVs are so full of trash we're supposed to be pleased when Montag turns his flamethrower on them...
I feel like the structural parable of Nineteen Eighty-Four is often missed in comparative analysis of the book. The social order of IngSoc did not place everyone under strict supervision. Only the "Outer Party" members were so pursued.
This does bear an unsettling resemblance to the state of party discipline in this country. Whether it's Adam Kinzinger, Tulsi Gabbard, Mitt Romney or Bernie Sanders, intraparty dissidents are increasingly strung up in public as an example to the rest.
Real world single-party systems are just the opposite, in way - at least when they're not at their most dysfunctional. One perk of joining the party is apparently that you are trusted to explore mildly "dissident" ideas for your own benefit, and even discuss them among party members in a quasi-democratic way, without this being considered "rocking the boat".
>One perk of joining the party is apparently that you are trusted to explore mildly "dissident" ideas for your own benefit, and even discuss them among party members in a quasi-democratic way, without this being considered "rocking the boat".
Consistent with the perks the nomenklatura had in the Soviet Union, including being able to obtain Western and rationed goods at special stores.
The intellectual permissiveness extended to the highest ranks. Stalin was probably the most powerful man on Earth during his lifetime, but even he didn't always get his way in the Politburo. Sometimes Stalin was on the losing side of a debate. But win or lose, the Soviet leadership emphasized speaking with a unified voice regardless of whether one had supported or opposed the outcome.
It's been a while since I read 1984, but I had thought "Outer Party" was a description of social class that encompassed far more than partisan candidates for office like the ones you mentioned--you had to be in at least the Outer Party to have any job important enough to influence public opinion.
When I go to buy a book, I buy a book with the hope it will make me grow as a person. That said, there are many books that implant mind viruses into the reader and the reader uses the book as an ideological weapon against reality. They take the author too seriously and don't doubt or become skeptical about different parts of the book, instead they taking everything to heart. This is why some books are basically a comment on other books, or a retort.
> While Rogan’s views on vaccination are regrettable and profoundly unhelpful to America’s attempts to battle the pandemic, his podcast is also a near-perfect simulacrum of the books burned by the firemen in Fahrenheit 451.
Writing about dystopian societies, I find it pert how gingerly the author tiptoes around the Joe Rogan's podcast topic. He makes his point well, yet makes sure he sprinkles in the required disclaimers lest he gets attacked, demonstrating exactly what he is writing about.
How could they tell? — and that's the point. When you see the standard disclaimers, you don't know if they were placed there as an honest expression of the writer's opinion, or if they were put there by order of their mind's "legal department".
> If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.
Weird, I thought the issue was giving him two sides to a question when there are often many. Give someone only two options and you can shape their choices.
This hits close. My government in Canada is arresting protestors and about to announce the equivalent of Marshall Law, as early as today. How should I prepare? Any tips from those who lived through such events or read the book?
This is all of human history. People always want the ideas they believe to be harmful to remain unaired - and this is a reasonable stance from a utilitarian perspective, assuming the censorship works. I don't like it, but that's the nature of prisoners' dilemmas: free speech requires a degree of cooperation among all participants to adhere to rules of engagement, and this trust is both easily broken and profitable to break.
Progressives cancel Rogan for spreading anti-vax sentiment, Conservatives try to cancel schools for studying CRT. Socrates was cancelled to death; it seems to be an eternal factor in political engagement.
I love how the conservatives love to posture as “free speech defenders against cancel culture”. but curiously you haven't heard about these people (Quillette, Fox et Al.) when a metal concert was deplatformed by Christians activists in Paris[1] last year. Or when the Wisconsin GOP representatives tried to ban the words “multiculturalism” or “critical race theory” from schools[2] … Or this time when AP fired a journalist for being pro-Palestine[3] after conservatives pressured …
While I appreciate the warnings and allusions to important books that predicted a lot of the cultural phenomena today, those books and authors were reacting to a very specfic strain of totalitarian movement that was expanding out of the mere nation states it used as hosts (artifacts of the 18th and 19th centuries) and to expand around the world.
In the case of Orwell writing in 1948, he was writing about the war propaganda machine he had just spent the last decade experiencing both fighting Franco and surviving the Nazis - but also living in post-war England, and Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in years later in 1953, just as the Cold War (that would persist for at least 40+ years) against the global spread of soviet totalitarianism was well into its initial stages.
It's great that writers are still recognizing there is a viral ideology that moralizes destruction, and both social and cognitive disorder for its own purposes, but talking about it in terms of these older books may be too polite a euphemism that only lands with others who would have been old enough to read them and already see the issue. The reason the meme takes hold is that it appeals to people who didn't grow up reading those authors and being innoculated against totalitarian meta-ideologies, and in truth, those works of fiction were powerful, but they did not address the roots of what allows them to compromise and bind the human spirit. I don't think the article is persuasive to someone who would benefit from having their mind changed, and it's too easy to wrap these old authors in a thought terminating talking point. It's going to take new and deep writing, art, and tech that irrevocably moves perspective. The author is as brave as he can be while maintaining access to his platform, but art without risk and sacrifice is just entertainment, and I don't think we entertain ourselves out of something we have entertained ourself into.
However, his closer is where I would start:
> There are elements of Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Bradbury’s dystopian visions in our present reality, but perhaps we prefer to describe them all as “Orwellian” because it implies that our circumstances have been imposed upon us against our will. It is painful to accept that we are complicit, and that we are currently living out perhaps the darkest of those visions by demanding to live in ignorance. Yet it is precisely because we have chosen this fate that we have the ability to alter it.
Why is Joe Rogan an example of book burning when there is literal book burning happening? I’m very confused. This strikes me of a position that is advocating in bad faith by cherry picking examples and ignoring more obvious examples of claimed phenomenon.
(Similarly, why is social media being pointed to when we have literal banned book lists in schools, and literal banned teaching materials?)
> Why is Joe Rogan an example of book burning when there is literal book burning happening?
Because right wing groups have very little cultural power at this point. They may have some political power, but that doesn't count for much when the culture is not on your side. So yes, their book burning is bad, but it's ultimately not that consequential simply because these groups don't have the near-total cultural dominance of the left. It's like being punched by a six year-old, not good, but ultimately nothing more than a minor nuisance.
On the other hand the types of folks calling for Joe Rogan's head dominate practically every cultural power center in American life: the educational system, the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, Corporate America, etc. So we they start trying to censor things, it's a big deal because they actually have the power to do some real damage, in a way that some hillbilly preacher could only dream of.
Perhaps one of the most irritating traits of the American left is that they've never come to terms with the fact that they are the establishment. When you erroneously view yourself as a scrappy underdog instead of the vanguard of the establishment, you tend to get a little reckless in how you use your power.
Honestly, I don’t really care about whether or not the most popular podcaster to ever exist believes he’s somehow being deplatformed. He’s obviously not- he remains the most popular podcast to ever exist. Maybe Joe Rogan is the new Dixie Chicks but I’ll wait until radio hosts refuse to play him before I believe it.
I also don’t know why the most popular podcast ever is considered an example of book burning but not a literal massive book burning, or the literal banning of teaching materials to hundreds/thousands of kiddos. That the article doesn’t address this strikes me as cherry picking, because they obviously seem more relevant than someone who is still massively popular and well loved.
There is certainly something to be said about the phenomenon of pruning an entertainers library due to cultural controversy, but invoking specifically book burning and censorship of books when ignoring actual books being burned and actual books being banned strikes me as trying to invoke a hysterical as opposed to rational reaction to the phenomenon.
It's not just hillbilly preachers though is it? It's popularly elected state governments, roared on by media empires with massive audiences, passing new legislation which causes certain books to be pulled from school libraries by teachers fearful of ending up in court. (I do agree that the groups pushing for such outcomes do so in the guise as the scrappy underdog, but they definitely aren't "the left")
Arguments that this stuff is somehow inconsequential compared with the reckless horror of a media company editing the back catalogue of its highest paid public face don't come across as sincere defences of free speech.
> Perhaps one of the most irritating traits of the American left is that they've never come to terms with the fact that they are the establishment.
The list of US Presidents, Supreme Court judges, the Senate and Congress, local governments, etc. in my lifetime is pretty darn close to even with some small fluctuations from decade to decade.
> When you erroneously view yourself as a scrappy underdog instead of the vanguard of the establishment, you tend to get a little reckless in how you use your power.
Both the Left and Right willingly embrace the idea of being the suppressed victims of the other, regardless of their perceived or actual power.
> Because right wing groups have very little cultural power at this point
Except at the state/local level, where they do, and where they end up creating very real harm by going on witch hunts for things like "critical race theory", or persistently trying to ban essential medical procedures.
The cultural zeitgeist leans left, because the left professes acceptance (earnestly or not). The establishment tends towards acceptance because it's economically prudent - commercial interests are fundamentally ambivalent about culture. But for example, plenty of the establishment plainly leans right - eg Fox news and talk radio.
However where the establishment has bona fide interests, it differs sharply from "the left" - wars, economic reform, corporate reform, surveillance - to the degree that it's patently nonsensical to say that the establishment overall "leans left". One of the most irritating traits of "the right" is they're overly focused on the kids-table topic of two-sided "culture war", and then pigeonhole everything that disagrees with them in the larger sphere as "the left".
From my perspective, the real battle line is libertarian-individual vs authoritarian-corporate. If the grassroots of both tribes could stop being distracted by the (establishment-manufactured) culture war bullshit, they'd see they have much more in common than not. For one example, the recent murder of Amir Locke is a straightforward 2nd amendment issue.
The Commies never do. Stalin was still "defending his revolution" in the late 30s long after all those millions had been murdered. That's the nature of their barbarous ideology.
Because this is an article for Quillette, which is an outlet for far-right propaganda. That is all. It is not in any way an intellectually honest or rigid argument, it is pushing a rightwing agenda.
No, we're not. Censorship of public comments are not new or particularly notable, and you could say far less (or more accurately, a different restricted set of things) in a public forum 50 years ago than you can say now.
Also, characterizing Orwell's dystopia as consisting of "censorship, mind control, and violence" is not meaningful or specific. We have and have always had censorship, we have and always have enforced norms through violence, and "mind control" doesn't mean anything. Orwell's dystopia was based on total surveillance with multiple layers of redundancy. That's the important thing that is happening now. And there's not a writer at Quillette than has anything against it. They're busy complaining that the normal allies of intolerance are blowing them off when it affects their marketing.
Take comfort, Quillette, in the fact that plenty of the people who will fire you in a second from their companies to alleviate the pressure of a bad media cycle initiated on twitter because you called a black person a monkey, those same people are financing your magazine and salaries, and found your tweet funny.
Typical low-quality extended whine from a propaganda outlet.
I'm not particularly comfortable with calling the act of individuals refusing to engage with an idea "bottom-up censorship". Censorship requires a willing speaker, willing listener, and some kind of power dynamic - i.e. who is censoring - that prevents the former from communicating with the latter. I'm willing to accept the label being applied to governments, monopolies[0], platforms[1], and violent terrorism[2]; because in every instance there's a very clear power dynamic that I can point to and say "this is the thing that's censoring people".
If someone with social capital decides to attack something and other people believe it, there is a power dynamic. But other people have to actually read the critique and decide if they agree with it or not. If the critique is untrue, then you can argue it's defamation. But in many cases the critique is either true, or at least not untrue enough to reach the level of defamation (in at least the US). If someone says "don't listen to this guy, he's a COVID denier[3]", and he is a COVID denier, then... is that any different from every potential listener discovering that for themselves and deciding to tune out?
Ok, but... can't the mob itself be the power dynamic?
Ordinarily yes, but they're also the ones deciding whether or not to listen. And if we're going to argue that a bulk refusal to listen is censorship, then we're starting to tread down a road in which we argue absurdities, like spam filters being censorship. Again, this is distinct from issues of defamation (covered above). We are talking about people deciding not to listen to someone because of their views on a particular issue. As much as that can be close-minded, putting the label of "censorship" on it implies a moral obligation to force people to listen to things they don't want to. I don't think we should go this far.
[0] Comcast, Cox, Cablevision et. all
[1] Facebook, Twitter, the iOS App Store, Reddit, Amazon, etc
For those wondering I'm not calling for the reinstatement of a certain former President's Twitter account. As far as I'm concerned any reasonably neutral application of Twitter's rules would have banned him sooner than 2021.
[2] neo-Nazis, right-wing extremist Islamic or Christian terrorists, etc
[3] For the sake of "balance" you may mentally replace the phrase "COVID denier" with any other common thing that right-wingers used to or are using to cancel left-wingers.
Yeah, leaving Spotify for Tidal is exactly like burning books. Spotify clearly had an economic right to my subscription perpetually and I'm a Nazi for going elsewhere.
Pynchon in "V" (1963) spells out the kind of everyone-sees-the-bad-news-daily future that I live every time I read a newspaper or, you know, get a NYT push notification:
""
Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1 August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7 August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100. The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey killed 138.
These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world - which simply doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under "Disasters" - which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.
""
The other dystopias I've been wondering about are
* Heinlein, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" (a lot to unpack - with political structures echoed in "The Expanse")?
* Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon"? (we kind of have this; but certainly not "Requiem" because no one would actually try to stop today's space entrepreneurs from going up themselves, certainly not their kids)
* Heinlein, "Starship Troopers"? Is anyone anywhere in the US political spectrum still interested in service guaranteeing citizenship, or even service, citizenship, or any kind of principled governance?
* Heinlein, the weird multiverse ones? :/ Or the juveniles?
* Rand: look I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged" but I don't think the current Great Resignation is quite what she had in mind ;)
* Shea & Wilson: Do we in fact already live in an "Illuminatus!" style world where secret sneaky stuff is happening just under the hood, fantasy and reality are wildly intermingled with it being impossible to distinguish them, the elites inhabit the same physical plane as us but somehow have a totally different existence?
* Babot, Lee, and Inkol: Does the 1996 Sci-Fi Channel Michael Paré classic "Carver's Gate" in fact perfectly predict our 2060 future where the world has become unbearable due to climate catastrophes and everyone retreats as much as possible to the metaverse, where they live out the only fulfilling parts of their lives in a system controlled by a megacorporation?
* Bacigalupi's "The Calorie Man": could almost all agribusiness one day rely on DRM'd food sources controlled by a few megacorporations? We've seen hints of this in a few other novelists' work.
* One I can't quite remember, I think a blog post and not a SF story per se, envisioning a rapidly warming world where wealthy nation-states patrol their borders with armed drones who ruthlessly enforce migration rules as hopeless climate refugees flee desperately to inhabitable places?
It's hard to see the future. Hope we'll land in a good one.
>* Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon"? (we kind of have this; but certainly not "Requiem" because no one would actually try to stop today's space entrepreneurs from going up themselves, certainly not their kids)
D. D. Harriman didn't have biological children. His company's board of directors stopped him from traveling to space in "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and by "Requiem" Harriman can't pass the physical test required for spaceflight, even though rockets are everywhere.
I don't think such an outcome is unrealistic at all. If Bezos were still Amazon CEO, and didn't have so much voting power, the Amazon board might very well have decided that he is too important to the company to fly on an experimental rocket.
One I've cited before: Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy: No matter how much technology progresses, poor people are still poor, and/because everything is owned by corporations (including governments).
> But the calls kept coming. From legal. From HR. From a board member. And finally, from my boss, the CEO of the company. I explained why I felt so strongly about the issue, citing data on the safety of schools and the harms caused by virtual learning. While they didn’t try to muzzle me outright, I was told repeatedly to “think about what I was saying.” ... In the last month, the CEO told me that it was “untenable” for me to stay. I was offered a $1 million severance package, but I knew I’d have to sign a nondisclosure agreement about why I’d been pushed out. The money would be very nice. But I just can’t do it. Sorry, Levi’s.
> I loved wearing Levi’s; I’d worn them as long as I could remember. But if you had told me back then that I’d one day become the president of the brand, I would’ve never believed you. If you told me that after achieving all that, after spending almost my entire career at one company, that I would resign from it, I’d think you were really crazy. Today, I’m doing just that. Why? Because, after all these years, the company I love has lost sight of the values that made people everywhere—including those gymnasts in the former Soviet Union—want to wear Levi’s.
"Meantime, the Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the company asked that I do an “apology tour.” I was told that the main complaint against me was that “I was not a friend of the Black community at Levi’s.” I was told to say that “I am an imperfect ally.” (I refused.) "
Jesus. That's horrendous. That's religious fundamentalism.
Brands like Levis never weigh in on controversial issues until they've hit a certain inflection point of public discourse and it is clear where the majority of society will land on it. Then in hindsight, they will try to present themselves as pioneers of progressive ideals when they really only hopped onto the bandwagon when it was clear which bandwagon was going to win the race.
Today, some of these issues are being litigated faster than they were in the past. But don't be mistaken. Nike almost dropped Colin Kaepernick in the heat of the moment of his controversy. They only embraced him a few years later when it was safe to do so. I suspect Jennifer Sey drank her own koolaid in thinking that she'd be able to come out one way or the other on this still hotly contested issue.
Marketers choose their words carefully and more importantly than that, refrain from taking a stand until they know precisely how it can be dutifully exploited for their brand's needs. You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry. There's a reason that corporations, and the brands which encapsulate their identities, have been called psychopaths.
You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry
I’m confused. Why would I dislike that marketers are doing their jobs? Are they not supposed to choose their words and bandwagons carefully? Do you want your dentist pushing his controversial opinions onto you while treating your teeth? If you have a conflict of interests (professional vs personal) you resign. I don’t see a problem here.
It still surprises me how much we care about a company's opinion, as if it were some kind of entity capable of thinking for itself. It's perhaps a kind of parasocial relationship. People often feel connected to brands in a way that, of course, the brand does not think about them. I imagine that's why people get personally hurt if their favourite brands speak out on a topic that put's them at oods.
Thanks for sharing this, awesome. I dropped Levi's a few years ago due to their stance against the second amendment. It's a shame what has happened to a lot of formerly great companies.
Ironically, the idea that books lead to social disharmony by perpetuating unequal "bourgeois privilege" was taken quite literally by some in China, and it became the basic tenet behind their 'Great Cultural Revolution'. As is well known, the same mindset was taken to outright murderous and even genocidal extremes in Khmer Rouge Cambodia. But it's far from dead even today, as many people even in the U.S. like to conflate education, book learning and bourgeois values more generally with a supposedly pervasive "Whiteness" or even "White supremacy", thereby implying a sort of privilege that can only be described as so extreme as to constitute ipso facto violent, racist oppression. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
Let's face it, the parts of academia where that discourse is most popular are not exactly focused on refined scholarship. The whole thing is essentially a legacy from the 1960s and 1970s when universities throughout the West were hotbeds of radical pro-Maoist (or more generally leftist, but Mao was very popular) sentiment. (This is why people who blame the Frankfurt School don't get it; some ideas from the Frankfurt theorists might have become popular, but the broad mindset came from elsewhere.)
Critical theory comes from the Frankfurt School, I think Horkheimer defined it. Mao has nothing to do with it.
This sound much more conspiratorial than what it actually is, which is a bunch of sociologists doing research and coming up with ideas that describe reality how they interpret it.
Sure, but did the 'Whiteness' and 'White supremacy' bogeymen come from Frankfurt school too? Doubtful. The basic attitude of looking for bogeymen and purported "oppression" to be struggled against is textbook from the "Gang of Four". What the Frankfurt School contributed was to reinforce the focus on culture and expand it to encompass societal dynamics, what you call "a bunch of sociologists doing research".
No, they didn't come from the Frankfurt school AFAIK, and they're also not bogeymen. They are both components of critical theory though, which as a discipline was created by the Frankfurt School; obviously there have been sociologists since who have expanded from the initial ideas, but they're critical theorists, not Maoists.
The basic attitude of looking for dialectical conflicts and understanding how they affect us is textbook Marx or Hegel. There will, of course, be elements of that in Mao's writing too, because he was a Marxist.
It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream and subject to lay analysis, because to properly understand things like 'white supremacy' in a critical context, you need some background in the philosophy and sociology involved. Without that, it just looks like 'all white people are inherently bad', which it isn't. Both liberals and conservatives get this wrong, so what starts out as an interesting academic topic looking at human social systems ends up as a political football.
> It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream
I sympathize. But the philosophy and sociology behind it all are again not very refined, much less apt to devise good responses that might otherwise mitigate whatever concerns or even 'conflicts' come up in the analysis. The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.
> The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.
That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. To take the "white supremacy" thing as an example, one of the key points is that the US transitioned from actual racist policy (slavery, redlining, segregation etc), to race-neutral policy, and race-neutral policy does not undo the damage that racist policy causes to black people's economic and social conditions. That does not translate to "white people bad, black people good" when presented without solutions; it describes a situation that is not essentialised at all to people's ethnicity, but came about as a product of historical dynamics between two racial groups and their economic and political interests (slavery existed for economic gain of plantation-owners, after all).
You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership to be able to interpret this stuff correctly, and I don't see that happening in many analyses, including your own. This leads to both the conservative interpretation of "CRT is about white people being inherently bad" and the liberal interpretation of "as a white person, I should feel guilty for the suffering of black people". These are both bad interpretations; the whole problem/solution model lies at the policy level.
> That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. ... You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership
Social systems can persist for generations. Your
whole argument would lead us to think that, e.g. there's nothing wrong with blaming detrimental aspects of Black culture as the only relevant causal factor behind the continued poverty and social marginalization of minorities in the U.S., but this is often regarded by many as being little different from showing overt hostility to Black people themselves. There's quite simply no shared consensus over what counts as an 'essentialised' vs. a properly nuanced analysis - a narrative focusing on historical dynamics and purported political interests can very much be so coarse and unsupported by evidence as to be quite 'essentialised' in practice. Arguably, this might describe much of what passes for scholarship in the 'critical' tradition, and the unrelenting, thoroughly naïve focus on facile narratives of "liberation from oppression" does not exactly help matters.
Blaming black culture for the continuation of black struggles is incorrect because it reverses the causality. Assuming by "detrimental aspects of Black culture" you mean the usual conservative talking points of gangs, rap, drugs etc - these things are driven by poverty, not the other way around. Eastern Europe is home to many of these afflictions for reasons of poverty as well; same with "chav" culture in the UK - and both of these cultural groups are white.
The point of origin of these issues is the ghettoisation of black people by redlining combined with the relative lack of wealth caused by slavery and subsequent discrimination; when you're stuck areas of little economic opportunity, gangs, impulsivity, violence and drug addiction are inevitable regardless of who is the victim. You can't really bootstrap a healthy economy from within a poor one.
To prove my point, look at Detroit - when it was a hub of car manufacturing (ie, healthy industry) it was a hub of economic productivity. When all the jobs left it collapsed. It was a majority-black city at both of these points; poverty was the only difference.
Thus, the people in this cycle can be said to be oppressed by their circumstances (not, importantly, other people); the systemic approach would be to try to lift these people out of poverty through policy-based interventions in order to liberate them from their dire circumstances.
The catchphrase of critical theory is that the aim is "liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". It is both coherent and a useful and pragmatic political approach to helping people get out of oppressive circumstances.
> Blaming black culture for the continuation of black struggles is incorrect because it reverses the causality.
Causal feedbacks are a thing, too - though admittedly, they might be hard to tease out via a purely "historical" analysis. Ultimately, one wants to look at purely exogenous "forcings" when faced with potential feedbacks. Teaching the fundamentals behind the bourgeois ethic in schools and via public awareness raising might be a good "exogenous" intervention that would mitigate this particular problematic feedback. The prevailing orientation these days among self-described 'progressive' elites is just the opposite: successful values are portrayed as the mere reflection of "Whiteness", and implicitly, the converse attitudes are praised as authentic. Can we really expect this to be a positive development? Is this really what passes for "a useful and pragmatic political approach to helping people get out of oppressive circumstances" in modern academia?
(Of course, this is not to say that interventions on the "overall circumstances" side of the equation might not also be successful! For example income transfers to the poor, when accompanied by good surrounding incentives, have sometimes worked very well to bootstrap sustained growth. The recent childcare-focused tax subsidies seem to be exploring this direction.)
Of course there are self-reinforcing feedback loops - that's the sad nature of poverty traps. Once you get into poverty it's extremely difficult to climb back out, that's the issue I was describing - and to consistently get people out of poverty, external interventions are required (which not only benefits them, but society at large as poverty tends to make people economically unproductive and causes other social diseases like addiction and crime that affect the general public).
I think the discourse around "Whiteness" is poisoned by liberals who can't understand systemic analysis and thus project critical theories into the space of the individual. I share your frustration with this - Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are extremely counterproductive and barely understand the topics they have made careers out of. That's what happens when progressive ideas get sold to corporations by management consultants - and much of the liberal interpretation of these ideas comes from these same types of sources.
There's a great talk out there by Camille Anna Paglia (possibly in
conversation with Jordan Peterson) where scathingly she talks about
the takeover of universities in the late 60s by small-minded bourgeois
careerists, authoritarian aparachik clutching little red books. They
(according to Paglia) were quick hijack the authentic projects of
humanist social critique (Fromm, Habermas etc and also civil rights
movement) as their own, to mininterpret, distort, weaponise and turn
them to serve personal ambition.
Small-mindedness is a dangerous. I think it was Emma Goldman who said
"the greatest violence is ignorance". Wilful ignorance, a la
Bradbury's 451, is therefore wilful violence, and Bradbury is right,
some people delight in it.
Huxley did this in the 30s, or as close as tech then allowed, with pillow speakers and "hypnopaedia" - for which he can't fairly be blamed, as back then they didn't yet know sleep teaching doesn't work - and even Doctor Who used the same idea back in 2006 or so for a Cybermen story.
Don't let the coincidental similarity of form factor distract you from the point of their use in these stories, which is that it's not the earbuds per se that are frightening, but rather the idea that everyone with them is always hearing exactly the same thing. This could scarcely be less true of modern earbuds, be they made by Apple or otherwise.
>This could scarecely be less true of modern earbuds.
No software at all runs on those phones without Apple allowing it. They’ve censored Xscrensaver because they were worried about the political thoughts users might have while watching it. The AirPods aren’t controlled yet but most of the apps are forced to put disclaimers on the screen if you pull up anything controversial and if we’re being honest, most people are probably listening to the same pop music that is being pushed as “culture.”
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this.
Suppose I choose to personaly "censor" and stop paying attention to Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, reddit and that crappy podcast on Spotify, after I understand they're just cesspools of ignorance, childish memes and tribalism. Now I can use that time to read books from authors I don't necessarily agree with but that can engage me in a deeper discussion. Am I really practising "censorship"?
My point is: selecting quality is not "censorship" it is mental hygiene. Bad discussions and bad ideas should really be discarded. When you tune out from a creationist, anti-vaxer, flat-earth prophet or global warming denier you are selecting for quality.
A debate where all opinions are equally valid is not healthy. Logically sound opinions are better than stupid ones. It is the most fundamental idea from Information Theory: filter out the noise, keep the signal.
Information overload forces you to do selection. And that's not "censorship".