Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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The best, less biased and least slippery slopey way to do this would be to provide more information, not less. If people are in a position to justify violence through something they read online, they also need to learn the opposite side and why that something they read might be wrong.

Of course this assumes things happen in a vacuum, but in reality people don't really justify violence by reading a thing as much as they confirm and reinforce pre-existing ideas they have. In which case all you've managed to do is to give power to already too powerful people (government) for silencing thoughts they disagree with.

Also FWIW i disagree with the notion that trying to restrict the ways people talk and think has anything to do with freedom. And consider that your thoughts about 1984 might also be your inability to see yourself being wrong (i mean if you cannot consider yourself being wrong in this case and since what you consider a good solution is shown as a bad one in 1984, then you consider 1984 to be bad instead of your solution).

I think theoretically more not less sounds technically correct, the problem is we seem to already been enveloped in too much information. So there has to be some filtering, and filtering is basically editorializing, so who decides?

I don't know if I'm right. And I don't know if I'm advancing even a coherent idea about this.

I think in reality people do justify violence by the narratives they are exposed to. I think they see other people justifying hate and violence with these narratives, and they think to do it as well. I think narrative can give a concrete form to a pre-existing hate, frustration, anger or disatisfaction, and narrate a villain responsible for that feeling. These narratives inform and shape a person's worldview and their notions of who or what is responsible for how they feel and things they see happening. Narrative is an incredibly powerful way to guide people's actions.

Observe this: your narrative about the weakness of narrative in determining action, guides us to believe we ought not regulate narrative. You're shaping reality using the very tool you are saying cannot be used to shape it!

Double-think extraordinaire! No offence to you, just trying to (en)lighten this up.

> I think in reality people do justify violence by the narratives they are exposed to. I think they see other people justifying hate and violence with these narratives

This is true, but the question is then Plato's: who guards the narrative guards? What narratives do they tell themselves in their righteousness? Pretty much everyone ends up with a narrative about how they're doing X for the good of society, even the Nazis.

It's a very good question.

As to a condition required for this to operate safely, I think it depends on having a clear set of morals and values in society that we agree on. The West has lost that after the boom post WWII. Maybe it will find its way back, and "moral authority" will be something people mostly agree on again. I think the way we get there is by debate, so we need to be able to openly talk about and criticise a whole range of ideas, nothing should be off the table during the debating phase.

As to the operation of it with supervision, hopefully, for those of us in democracies, it operates in the same way that our democracies operate, where the guards of the people are guarded by the people. At least, that's the idea, right?

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