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Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
I've never heard of even opponents of free speech claiming that we have to get rid of it because people will believe in printing money.
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Like others have said, free speech protects us from people with terrible ideas that have never worked like printing money and ruthless censorship to achieve utopia. But I would like to focus on your last paragraph - while I don't want you to go anywhere and thought this was a well written post, it seems like an odd take for the motte. If life is too short for even arguing and winning, what are you doing here? Just by posting here you are damaging the credibility of your argument, because the motte was built in response to the type of censorship you apparently approve of. By posting here you are demonstrating that you at least tacitly also approve of attempts to circumvent censorship.
I see paragraph structure as creating what a computer scientist would think of as a "scope". My sentence
is local to the paragraph, and part of the discussion of potent, recurring bad ideas.
I'm happy enough to debate Socialism_2.0. If I argue against Socialism_2.0 and win, I will consider the time well spent. But I notice that most advocacy for Socialism is for Socialism_1.0. It is advocacy for a straight repeat of policies that have failed and are doomed to fail. To argue against Socialism_1.0 and win is a terrible waste.
Perhaps you are uncomfortable placing yourself in my shoes. Fair enough. Try instead walking a mile in the shoes of those who advocate for Socialism_2.0. They notice that the arguments over Socialism_1.0 suck the oxygen out of the room. They cannot recruit opponents. They would like moderate push-back. If opponents take Socialism_2.0 seriously and point out flaws, that opens the way to correct the flaws, create Socialism_2.1 and see it adopted. They cannot recruit allies. Young people who are Socialist inclined have no patience for understanding why Socialism_1.0 will never work, nor for mastering the intricacies of Socialism_2.0 nor indeed for creating the intricacies of Socialism_2.0. In the world of endlessly recurring bad ideas, advocates of Socialism_2.0 are marginalised. There is no formal apparatus of censorship, and yet the ends towards which such an apparatus would be directed, are mysteriously achieved.
That said, what am I doing here? We both joined in September 2022. You have made 640 comments, I have made 17. I am not much "doing here". I am defeated by age and ill health. And also by the sense of the futility of political engagement. It is all so "Oh no! Not again!". I'm haunted by a comment that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, eleven years ago.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mPJu6d2jMwvGuB2BT/meta-karma-for-last-30-days?commentId=T4Tcz7GhhKFSCXuCc
Yudkowsky is concerned with the failure of websites. But what of the failure of whole societies? Do we need to focus our efforts positively? Does society as a whole need a banhammer to limit the costs of repeating impressive refutations of bad ideas?
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The problem is that banning discussions not only forbids bad ideas, but almost all new ideas. We don’t therefore progress as fast as we might as good ideas are kept out of discussions and therefore aren’t tried.
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And if your idea of idea suppressing is one of these great bad ideas? Precisely how much do you trust that it'll be the wise government that chooses which of these ideas is bad and which is not? We have better ways to remember now than ever and technology is nothing else is moving us forward. Lets not bet it all that we'll pick the right ideas to freeze in amber for all of time.
I half agree that the idea of censorship is a bad idea that ought to be suppressed. The factor of two in the denominator comes from splitting the concept of censorship into two. One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship.
Monocensorship is the traditional notion of a unitary system of censorship, with a Chief Censor who is a kind of Monarch. This is a much worse idea than it initially appears. The Chief Censor has three kinds of power: ideal power, armour power, network power.
Ideal power is the power to suppress bad ideas. It is what the Office of Censorship is for. Obviously this works badly. Some good ideas are suppressed because humans cannot reliably tell good from bad. Worse the Chief Censor is unsupervised. Yes, there are rules. This is to be blocked. That is to be permitted. But nobody gets to see what is blocked, so the Chief Censor gets to please himself and block whatever he disapproves of. It is built into the structure of Monocensorship that people don't know that permitted material is being blocked, because they don't get to see it.
Armour power. Criticism of the Chief Censor is the second victim of overreach. If you find out that your permitted political opinions are blocked, you will complain, and your complaints will also be censored
Network power. After a hundred years, the seventh Chief Censor gets a circle jerk going. The lazy and incompetent government bureaucracy make the lives of citizens miserable. If you complain, you get censored. Why? Try complaining about the Chief Censor. Your interactions with the bureaucracy will get even worse. The quid pro quo of the Chief Censor protecting the bureaucracy from criticism is that the bureaucracy retaliates against critics of the Chief Censor.
Bicensorhip is the idea of sacrificing the old to protect the young. There are two classes of people, Elders, say the over forties, and Juniors. Twenty-something Juniors hear rumours of Communism. They go looking and find tales of Gulags and Terror Famines and not much else. They notice the censorship and get told "you'll get the full story when you are an Elder."
Twenty years later our twenty-something Junior goes to his Elder Initiation and gets his access-all-areas pass. What was the full story of Communism? By the time he is forty, he has lived out the story of good intentions and bad consequences in his own life. He gets to read the positive advocacy for Communism and it seems a little off. How do they not see that it is going to end badly?
But what do I have in mind with "sacrificing the old to protect the young"? Think about Breatharianism, the idea that one can live on light, no food required. Some young people believe it. Mix together naivety, wishful thinking, and a touch of mental illness; some young people starve themselves to death. Censoring Breatharianism protects young people. Age and experience partially protect the Elders. But once in a while, an Elder gets his access-all-areas pass, discovers Breatharianism, becomes a believer and starves himself to death.
Don't old people deserve protection from bad ideas? Shouldn't we change from Bicensorship to Monocensorship to protect every-one, young and old? Think about the social dynamics of Bicensorship. There will always be a temptation to make the qualifying requirements for being an Elder a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, until after a hundred years it has turned into Monocensorship. The social dynamic pits news stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography or reading Ted Kaczynsky and turning into primitivist terrorists, against abstract principles of having a large body of people with access-all-areas passes to keep an eye on the censors.
We see that Bicensorship and Monocensorship are mortal enemies. Those who believe in Monocensorship want to protect everybody, young and old. (The cynical take is that they fancy themselves as Chief Censor and hate Bicensorship because it cripples the power of the Chief Censor.) Those who believe in Bicensorship answer the call of duty and willing undertake the work of an Elder, exposing themselves to bad ideas to keep the Chief Censor in check and preserve young peoples access to good ideas that the Chief Censor doesn't like. (Cynically, you cannot abolish Eldership, because Elders love their weird porn, even as they accept that it is too weird for young people.) I could see the social dynamics of Bicensorship being stabilized by ruthless censorship of the idea of Monocensorship. Stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography are kept out of the news. The whole idea of protecting Elders from bad ideas is missing from common discourse. Those who advocate Monocensorship run into a brick wall:"censorship is about sacrificing the old to protect the young" is the thought terminating cliche that the NPC's chant back at them, and the idea of protecting the old from bad ideas gets no traction, even when it can evade censorship.
The fun part of this comment is normifying "A system of Bicensorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of Monocensorship.". Since normies hate neologisms, they have to merge Bicensorship and Monocensorship into just censorship. This leads to the normie version: "A system of censorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of censorship." Which sounds weird. If you force it to make sense you probably come up with a notion of censorship censoring the concept of censorship so that people don't have the words to understand what is going on. That changes the meaning. When Bicensorship protects itself by censoring Monocensorship all of the Elders are in on it and know what they are doing and why. Sometimes you really do have to coin new words and split an old word in two.
Or in other words, it's the paradox of tolerance; the idea that a tolerant bicensoring society is a contradiction in terms, since a bicensoring society will be destroyed by tolerating monocensorship yet cannot truly claim to be tolerant of everything if they censor it. This concept is intentionally misused by monocensorship proponents when it comes to certain things bicensorship permits elders to view.
It helps if the old aren't provided with excuses (in this case, economic) to hate the young in this regard; our requirement for "elder" was "physical adulthood" in the 1900s, was 18 by 1980, and we're closer to 25-30 now (the meme about "fully developed brains" is specifically designed to evoke and reinforce this viewpoint).
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If we could somehow ensure that the people doing the censoring had correctly learned the lessons of history that other people had failed to learn then this would be great. But ensuring that is about as hard an just ensuring that we all collectively remember those lessons in the first place.
I see an ambiguity in the notion of learning the lesson of history.
One version involves people poring over the history. Doing X didn't work last time. It didn't work the time before either. People make adjustments, informed by the past. They do X version 3. It doesn't work. Merde! Some commentators claim that the adjustments were silly and stood no chance of making a difference to the outcome. People knew the history and did X anyway because they don't learn from history.
An alternative version involves people ignoring the history. A few point out that X didn't work last time. One more knowledgeable person points out that it didn't work the time before that either. The naysayers get told "this time is different". The people saying "this time is different" know nothing of last time and know of no difference between this time and last time. But they want to do X and "this time is different" are the magic words that let you do X. They repeat X version 1 and it fails the same way it failed the previous two times.
I believe in both versions. Sometimes there is a real, but unsuccessful effort to learn from history. We say that people didn't learn from history, because we judge by results. But there was an honest effort. I see no reason to censor such efforts. Other times, only a few people study the history. They are unanimous: don't do it! But they get out voted, and X gets done with foreseeable bad results. If you were paying attention, you notice that the bad results were actually foreseen. We would be much better off if we censored those saying "We should do X. This time is different."
Well, that is my claim. I don't think it fails because it is hard to learn the correct lesson from history. I think that there are cases were a policy doesn't work in theory, doesn't work in practice, and those in the know, know. There are low hanging fruit, ripe for plucking. Society screws up because people ignore the history because they don't care.
But is my claim true? I think that the weakest point is that the power to censor is a power honey pot that will attract a lot of wasps. I'm talking of technocrats carefully selecting the low hanging fruit. But society is run by chancers and grifters who don't care whether the fruit hangs low or is ripe. They want power. They want money. If there is an Office of Censorship, they will fight to control it, planning to censor any-one who blocks their route to power and money. I don't know what to do with this insight. It proves too much. If I take it seriously I end up an anarchist and reject government and power structures entirely.
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