Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

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No, when I think that an idea is false or harmful or both, I feel morally compelled to present the reasons I think that as clearly and cogently as possible in an effort to provide additional information both to the person presenting the false and/or harmful idea and anyone else who might be observing the exchange. Censorship is inherently immoral.

My hope is to persuade others that the initial idea is false and/or harmful, not to prevent others from hearing the bad idea.

If I succeed, the bad idea still exists, but others can understand why the idea is bad and recognize similarly bad ideas in the future.

If you simply censor the bad idea, at least two bad things happen as a consequence: 1) the bad idea is not refuted, and so is likely to be reintroduced later with fewer people who understand why it is a bad idea; and 2) the person who originated the bad idea does not have any reason to change their mind, but rather is more likely to resent being censored and so hold that bad idea more tenaciously and attempt to spread it more surreptitiously.

I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society. Based on my understanding of history, it is, in fact, a precursor to totalitarian society.

While I do agree on the social harm of censorship, unfortunately your approach is susceptible to asymmetric info-attacks under adversarial conditions.

Specifically, under the condition where the debate actually matters, your compulsion can be exploited by putting out any number of variedly wrong ideas, for which you pay an asymmetrically higher cost to refute, and an opportunity cost of not being able to present ideas of your own.

The debate can this way be framed to either never reach "consensus", or to do so at the counterparty's favored position.

The widespread use of this strategy is a reason why society is falling back on censorship as opposed to reason.

This thread is surrealistic to me in light of the NPR retraction. They didn't retract the article because it was some fringe opinion they didn't stand by, they retracted it because it was factually wrong. It would be as if they published an article saying "water is a yellow gas" then later removed it saying "actually that was a load of crap, nevermind".

So instead you'd prefer if they had kept the original article but added after each sentence "except it probably didn't happen that way"?

>I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society.

There's nothing recent about that, it's as old as humanity itself. Every culture has its taboos and its sacred cows. I don't think there's any society where you could say absolutely anything you want and stay out of trouble. The USA is extremely permissive but there's still slander, libel and hate speech at the very least. In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.

> This thread is surrealistic to me in light of the NPR retraction.

I was responding to the statement that bad ideas should be censored, not to the actions taken by NPR. I actually agree that NPR did the right thing by retracting the false information. That is a very different thing from censoring bad ideas. So yes, the thread derailed off into the swamp and here we sit on the wreckage.

> In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.

Yes, I know. I studied Nazism in depth during my undergrad years while earning a history degree. I still recall being nauseated for an entire semester because of the material in one particular course, in fact. The downside of restricting political thought is that those who create the restrictions generally become tyrants themselves.

I fully agree.

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