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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

That common argument rests on norms established by millennia of relatively difficult communication. Best not to assume that the same people would come to the same conclusions today.

For example, QAnon believers have not had their speech restricted. That conspiracy theory is as open as anything you could name. People have challenged it. It's still going.

If you believe that challenging terrible ideas makes those who hold them think twice... why hasn't the exact argument you're using gotten rid of the terrible idea that we should restrict speech? Answer: because logical refutation doesn't work.

I am not arguing against the slippery slope. This is a very, very hard and risky problem. I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.

View on HN

A number of other silly ideas that still hold traction and do actual damage despite being out in the open and actively refuted:

Moon landing conspiracy

Anti-vaccers/Vaccines cause autism

Fad diets and "detox"s

Anti-intellectualism

Alex Jones (to the tune of millions of subscribers on his recently killed youtube)

Global Warming

etc

And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea? For 40 years, Americans were told by the government to believe that low fat high carb diets were the key to a healthy life. Not only is that not true, but it's never been true. There was never any evidence to support that stance. And yet, that was the official government policy and subsequently the commonly held belief for 40 years.

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Not Mark Twain

And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?

This is a bad faith argument. I say so because the purported mechanism for such decision-making is actually spelled out upthread, and because this rhetorical question is then followed by a glaring fallacy of composition that seeks to draw a general conclusion from a single and highly over-simplified example.

So, the anti-GMO movement, far and away has more blood on its hands than even Alex Jone's dumb theories (see golden rice.) Should we police that speech? I believe anti-GMO is a silly idea, and a deadly one. Far more deadly that Jones claiming Sandy Hook wasn't real, far more deadly than a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Yet, we allow it, in fact in many cases we encourage it on the corporate/company level (see Chipotle.)

There are tons of "mom blog" type pages on Facebook that push this crap, it's a much much bigger industry than Jones. Where is the outrage there? Is it ok to ban their speech from a corporate platform? It does way more societal damage. Gwyneth Paltrow pushes things with her company "Goop" that can cause serious health problems. Should we ban her from Facebook? I just wonder where you draw the line, because if we're talking raw statistics on society damage, InfoWars or virtually any form of "hate speech" isn't even in the top 10.

It’s not a silly example but rather a common one. Many years ago it was only the fat that were attractive because they were the financially secure. Many believed that royalty were th only form of legitimate government, and colonial activity among “savages” was doing them all a favor.

Science, academics, and even personal experience vary with time. Not all variance that follows is truthful...some is exaggerated purposefully or accidentally, though most is considered good information at the time.

I didn't say it was silly. Please try to differentiate between the quotation that I'm responding to and what I said in response.

> And who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?

Any private, non-common-carrier party that is asked to relay it.

That is what freedom of speech/press means: people are free to evaluate content and decide for themselves whether to participate in spreading it.

I think that's the core question right there. For a while, various governmental bodies got to be the authority figure deciding which ideas were widely propagated. It's interesting to consider the outsized influence of Texas school boards here; the people who decided which textbooks would be used in Texas were elected officials. Texas has a huge textbook market. Accordingly, textbook vendors were incentivized to publish textbooks which fit Texas standards, and other states who didn't have the same influence wound up with those textbooks.

So: "who decides what is and isn't a silly idea?" Texas elected officials.

That's suboptimal in my view. It is also not great that four or five major companies have the same decision-making power. Fixing the problem is difficult, but I take some comfort in knowing that it's not actually a new problem.

That's all fine and dandy, but is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?

You posted them as examples of "bad ideas." Shouldn't you be able to tell me the factual standing behind the positions you hold?

Are you asking me to go through each of them and give a thorough post about the background of the issue, the facts as they lay, the most reasonable conclusions, the possible influences/biases from each side and their possible agendas etc etc etc?

And you're saying that I should do this each and every single time someone wants to discuss a (IMO) discredited study or blog post or something?

Do you not see how easy that is to abuse by people acting in bad faith? It's a pretty classic DDOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Isn't that what you tried to do to me? You asked me this: "is there actual factual standing behind the positions I listed?" First of all, why are you asking me about the factual standings of your examples? And second, you didn't just allege that the ideas you listed were 'silly'. You said they do "actual damage" despite being out in the open and actively refuted. Is it so much to ask that you provide proof? Had you just said "I think these are silly ideas" we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Hang on, just to check, which of the specific things called out as "bad ideas" do you take issue with?

Well, this sort of gets to the heart of it, doesn't it? A lot of what's being called a problem is basically people who go Gish galloping; they spew easily-refuted statements, rarely if ever offer any evidence or anything else to back them up, but if you so much as hint at the possibility that perhaps they might have said something a little bit mistaken, they come down on you like a ton of bricks with demands for citations and evidence. And on a platform like Twitter, it's not even one person who does that; wade into the wrong thread and you might have hundreds or thousands of people mobbing you with "citation needed" and ignoring any evidence you don't personally direct at them and them alone (and that's being charitable; most of them ignore evidence, period).

This wears people down quickly to the point that they just give up on challenging incorrect information, and then the people who spew it win by default and take over whatever platform they're on.

Why shouldn't platforms have the freedom to put a stop to that if they choose? What value is there in claiming "neutrality" on this (and really, there is no "neutral" -- there's only enabling it, or not enabling it, the platform's owners don't get to claim they're just bystanders when they're, y'know, providing the platform)?

> Why shouldn't platforms have the freedom to put a stop to that if they choose?

That's the heart of the question being asked. On the one hand, there's freedom of association. On the other, freedom of speech. Which one trumps the other and to what extent?

Spam is a form of speech.

For years, most providers and platforms have banned it, and people have organized to boycott providers who didn't.

Why is that apparently OK but other forms of organized boycott, or disassociation based on the content of speech, are not?

If the problem is "what determines truth", then there isn't an organization out there that could resolve the issue (barring something like the Chinese government, I suppose)

Did you just organically come up with the Ministry Of Truth?

I think their point was that unless you're willing to accept Minitrue you don't have an authoritative source of truth to check against.

Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread. Generally the people who post this stuff are the people already preconditioned to believe it. These people also have their views emboldened when they see it is banned...they view it as some conspiracy to hide the "truth." IMO, these bans against Alex Jones aren't going to have the good intended result they were meant to. If anything, this could drive more direct ad dollars to him and allow him to expand into another vertical that may attract and empower even more like him.

But I'm biased, I am generally against any form of censorship unless it is exploiting someone against their will (see snuff films, pedophilia, etc.) Slightly unrelated, but I fear that the Russian boogeymen is going to creep its way into outright censorship in the West via corporate America...which ironically is an outcome Putin and other Western adversaries desire.

> Note that most of these existed well before the internet and were just as widespread.

Do you have a citation for that? It seems unlikely that the Internet didn’t increase the reach for fringe views by making them available to everyone rather than just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.

> just the few who requested conspiracy materials by mail.

I remember conspiracy theory / UFO magazines being more widely distributed than regular newspapers. There's even a joke on that in the first Men in Black movie.

Was that ever more than a joke, though? The National Enquirer sold plenty of issues but almost everyone knew it was entertainment rather than a reliable source. Similarly, while bookstores had books & magazines they tended not to shelve them with more legitimate materials.

The other big difference was the barrier to entry: printing things cost real money and anything at all mass-market required a physical presence which could be sued for libel. In contrast, it’s much easier for anyone in the world to slap together a decent enough website or upload a video to YouTube and Google will feature it right next to official NASA content. Sure, anyone who wants to can learn that the source isn’t credible but the last decade really underscores that most people won’t check.

Are you really suggesting that conspiracy theories such as JFK, Roswell, Area 51, Antivaccine/"mark of the beast," Moonlanding, Big Foot etc weren't already in popular culture before the internet was popularized? Because, in fact, many of them spread because there was no wide usage of the internet (Roswell, probably being the #1.) It helps create lore. Even X-Files, a show that I adore, was really pre-popularized internet era.

Think of Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc. Those conspiracy theories led to the Oklahoma City bombing. And they were widespread prior to the internet being a big thing. Think of the Turner Diaries which was big in the early 90s, there are too many examples to even list.

9/11 was maybe the first popular internet spread conspiracy, but I would make a strong argument that without the internet it may have been more widespread because there is less online debunks.

I don't know if you've ever argued with a conspiracy theorist but their minds were made up before any major theory was proposed. It's a natural distrust of authority.

Do I have hard data? No, and I am willing to be that it would be incredibly hard to measure that anyhow, but I do have tons of anecdotes and history to back up the claim that it's nothing new. It's human nature.

re: "Think of Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc. Those conspiracy theories led to the Oklahoma City bombing"

What part of the admitted shooting of Vicki Weaver while holding an infant in her hands, and of 1 of Randy Weaver's under-18 sons, by FBI snipers; and the use of explosive/flammable igniters to disperse "CS gas", a form of tear gas, used against people inside wooden buildings in Waco [2], are conspiracy theories?

Even the US Gov't admits to the basic facts of both situations...?

[1] http://www.cnn.com/US/9510/ruby_ridge/ [2] http://www.cnn.com/US/9908/24/fbi.waco/

I think they may have meant that the conspiracy theory that an interconnected federal government planned Ruby Ridge and Waco, and planned more such incidents, led to the OKC bombing. What the government did was wrong and arguably it was systemically predisposed to do wrong in situations like that. But it wasn’t planning more such actions, the OKC bombing wasn’t connected (I think), and even if so the belief that bombing, rather than protests, court cases and elections, was the right thing to do, was delusional.

But if I’m wrong and they think that it’s a conspiracy theory to think those situations were mishandled or shouldn’t have been instigated, then thank you for bringing up the facts; we shouldn’t be credulous and assume US Marshall and ATF agents are competent or just because we saw them on TV.

Exactly, Ruby Ridge and Waco for that matter were completely bungled operations, and imo were largely unjustified hamfisted responses. However they weren't inherently nefarious, just sheer incompetence and cowboy minded policing. Yet their mere existence fueled a far right movement that believes they were. In an unfortunate turn, the OKC bombing was a direct result of that. It fell right into the preaching of Koresh as well as the popular right wing writings "The Turner Diaries." That was more or less my point, and all of that occurred well before people had regular internet access.

Well, that sheer incompetence indeed disappeared when it was time to cover all this up. Was that nefarious? Because this is what eventually motivated McVeigh, not some strange conspiracy theories. Let me quote:

"I waited two years from "Waco" for non-violent "checks and balances" built into our system to correct the abuse of power we were seeing in federal actions against citizens. The Executive; Legislative; and Judicial branches not only concluded that the government did nothing wrong (leaving the door open for "Waco" to happen again), they actually gave awards and bonus pay to those agents involved, and conversely, jailed the survivors of the Waco inferno after the jury wanted them set free.

"Other "checks and balances" likewise proved futile: media awareness and outcry (the major media failed in its role as overseer of government ally); protest marches; letter campaigns; even small-budget video production; etc. - all failed to correct the abuse."

Source: https://www.webcitation.org/5wow5v4MK?url=http://www.foxnews...

The initial intent was not nefarious, the execution was incompetent, the cover up of the incompetence was nefarious. That's not the same as saying the ATF torched the place to the ground, which isn't backed up by anything...and that's what McVeigh believed.

I’m suggest that we’re seeing things spread wider and faster than before, and that it’s easier to make things look legitimate because a lot of people assume things on YouTube or Facebook are vetted in some way.

Which is not an unfair assumption given they do remove some things.

So?

Laugh at them, and then contribute facts.

Next.

At any given time, these things are all part of the conversation. Suppressing them only adds to the allure.

Attempting to manage it, "for their own good" will not end well, and it won't end well because way too many people will fail to trust, share that and undermine it all.

As they should. That problem is why there is a First Amendment in the first place. I know that does not apply here, and I know why too.

Not my intent.

The dynamics that lead to having a First Amendment are my point.

The moment people begin to mistrust, and that catches fire and spreads is the moment the dialog gets toxic and hostile.

See my comment up thread.

And people like my mother? Who didn't do so well in statistics and science and math and therefore do not have the tools to rationally judge one claim versus another?

How do we help them not get pulled into, often alluring and attractive, circles of hate?

I know you're sincere, but do you see the danger in what you just said? Restricting ideas your mother can hear, based on your assessment of her competency to understand them "properly"?

That's a very dark path that does not lead to utopia.

I love you mom, but those people are fucking clowns.

How can I help?

(Have had this exact exchange. Took a while, but did resolve. Human problems take human work.)

Lane Davis's dad tried that approach, arguing to his son that he (the son) had fallen down a neo-nazi rabbit hole. Davis denounced his dad as a 'leftist pedophile' and stabbed him to death. I could supply a laundry list of examples, but the basic point I'd like to communicate is that once someone signs up to an eliminationist philosophy we have (to misquote Churchill) established what they are, and the only question is in what order they intend to pursue that project.

I want to be careful here to distinguish between ideas that mre merely wrong and those that involve imposition of their calculus upon others. For example, I consider flat earthers ridiculous but it's not like they are threatening to flatten out anything they consider overly curved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17740517

If it's actually criminal speech, enforce the law.

If it's not actually criminal speech, the answer is more speech.

That's a very nice platitude, but as reality has shown, it's a terrible rule.

It's not a platitude. And it's actually quite a good rule, when enforced consistently. That was not done in recent cases.

And, like I said. I'm just going to watch it play out. I'll be on the tail end of this thing to talk about it then. When people are more receptive.

Let's just say I am not getting upvotes on this. :D

Rather than actually have a real discussion, people prefer to "solve the problem."

It won't go well.

I will bow out of this discussion for now. There are places where a real conversation can be had, and this isn't one of them.

No, you're being pointed out that you're wrong. That "more speech" doesn't help, and can actually get people killed.

I have no complaints about the discussion I can see. I have no desire to go through Karma on people who would just rather down vote because they don't like what they read. Personally, I almost never downvote, would much rather engage and have a chat about things. Most of the time that happens here, on this topic it's obviously not.

And the whole thing is by no means definitive. I happen to have a very significant amount of experience with this.

If the speech is Criminal, then it can get people killed, (among other non trivial harm) so apply the law. Secondly, apply the law where it needs to be applied. Using a bludgeon, where Precision Instruments are more effective, only makes a bigger mess than intended.

There is a huge difference between, "fuck this guy we're done", and we're removing these because you're over the line. Even worse, what was done to Jones, is the bludgeon. And it was done without the precision, and consistent action needed to give the feedback necessary to justify and help people understand what just happened.

There will be negative and severe implications from all of that. It may seem fine now, but some precedents were just set, lines crossed. I'm not sure people thought that all through. Some important trust was just lost.

That stuff is different from speech that isn't Criminal, where the answer is more speech. It is also a matter of people learning to use all the tools they have, not just righteous indignation.

I'm not wrong at all.

However, I can tell the dominant mode here is some people think they can control other people. They also happen to think they know best for others, neither of which is true.

At the same time, recognizing our own personal agency in conversation, and educating people about that, and all the good it can do, is being near completely ignored in this discussion. That's an error.

And they are just going to have to learn the hard way.

I'll Stand By and Watch.

Wrote this on voice, sorry for the various spelling and other errors in this comment.

None of this is the slightest bit responsive to the point I made that some people;s response to losing an argument is to engage in violence. There's no law to enforce here, nobody suggested that Lane Davis should be arrested for the holding Nazi opinions. It's a simple observation that the solution to bad speech is not always more speech because people who are engaging in bad speech in bad faith often aren't interested in making progress through dialog.

That's why online trolls often make arguments that are empty of meaning but cling to a posture of superiority - they are not interested in winning an objective argument, but in having the appearance of controlling the conversation, so that if the honest interlocutor gets exasperated by the trollish arguments, the troll claims victory. Provocateurs at real life demonstrations engage in the same tactics. Supporters of authoritarian rulers revel in the discomfiture of their political opponents rather than any objective improvement in their own conditions.

Now, if you want to make general policy points and articulate your views that's fine, but if you're going to simply ignore your conversation partners and beat down straw man arguments of your own creation, why should anyone take your nostrums seriously?

As a general policy, we could return basic critical thinking to primary education.

Mine included First Amendment issues along with the following:

Recognition of propaganda forms. Done in the context of ADS at first, then later political media.

Agency in conversation. How to weigh words. Being called an ass by a clown, for example. The most common, basic response is righteous indignation. However, a better response is, "meh", or laughter to better identify the laughable. This was done in the context of ordinary conflict and media reported events.

Bias. There is always bias in media. Objectivity is something expensive and it takes time and people working together to actualize. Is that bias honestly represented? Secondly, how does that bias color conclusions or advocacy present? This was done in the context of news media. Was it from labor point of view or business, other? (Economic) For social, similar questions were asked and material identified.

Today, for example, few Americans realize there is almost no reporting from the labor point of view. There used to be. What jas changed?

Reasoning, fallacies, etc... the basics like what one may find at critical thinking dot org sites today.

My own kids did not get any of that. I provided it.

Regulating speech based on ehat could happen, or blanket assumptions about people being feeble, or some other condition will not end well. I will leave it there.

As for Lane, human work caries risks.

The control of speech needed to take that stabbing off the table is excessive.

Real conversations do involve real people who will do real things.

What I put here works.

I have done it with a gun pointed right at my chest, loaded, cocked.

That is no joke. And I could argue I had better tools to work with than the father did. Odds are favorable to me in that case too.

I have a solid set of intense experiences and some training in this area to draw on too. Did the father?

Maybe he should have those things. I would gladly fund them as part of my taxes. Money well spent. While at it, mandatory, blanket gun education would do a lot of good too, and in similar ways, for similar reasons, by way of similie here.

To me, bringing up one ugly fail amidst a sea of successes is counterproductive.

It is also rooted in fear of risks.

With people, speech, there are always risks.

Empowering people, doing more early human work will do more to break down those risks than taking a bludgeon to speech will.

Just one of a few reasons I felt it better to just step away.

We may just have to go through a draconian cycle here. I am not happy about that. And it will not play out like well meaning people think.

And I will be there at the peak to assist with the move back.

> logical refutation doesn't work.

It can work, if-and-only-if if it is done after real communication has been established. Most people trying to refute "obviously wrong" ideas skip the first step and start with arguing in a language and framing that they understand. This is noise when the other person uses a fundamentally different framework for what counts as "facts", "evidence", "authority", etc.

One of the better explanations of what I'm talking about is this[1] essay. While it discusses the creationist "debate", the ideas about trying to educate people that are resistant to science and logic apply generally.

Yes, logical refutation rarely works. However, did you bother to learn their language so there is a foundation of actual communication to build upon? Or did you argue in a language they don't understand? Even worse, did your argument appear to contain a lot of phatic expression that is hostile from their point of view?

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi... (see the heading "Hierarchical View of the World" and "The Problem of Language" for the main argument)

>I am refuting the misconception that shedding light on bad ideas makes them go away.

It doesn't make them go away. It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private.

If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil. If you refuse to let me speak about vaccines that only further proves that you're evil and trying to hide the truth - and strengthens my indoctrination. Now, poor arguments against anti-vaccers also serve to strength the indoctrination so there's some bad with the good... (Also just to be certain on things: "you" and "I" are used generically for easier writing, I support and believe in vaccines.)

There are also plenty of bad ideas that do die to public scrutiny - think of anytime anyone has ever been talked out of "doing something stupid" because they shared what they had planned to do.

> It allows them to be refuted - which hopefully stems at least some of the indoctrination that would otherwise occur only in private.

This does not appear to be the case. Consider the math, if nothing else:

Bad Idea Public convinces .1% of those who hear it and those people are irrationally convinced.

Bad Idea Private convinces 10% of those who hear it and those people are likewise irrationally convinced.

I'm assuming the private bad idea is 100 times as effective, which may or may not be accurate. Even so, as long as your private circles are smaller than ten million people or so, we're better off than we would be if your bad idea was hitting a billion people on the Internet.

I'm still not arguing about the difficulty of telling which ideas are good and which are bad.

> If everyone I've ever known tells me vaccines are evil and I never am told or shown otherwise - I'll grow up continuing to think vaccines are evil

Understand that forcing vile ideas into obscurity and forcing people to only ever see vile ideas are not even close to being the same thing. You could even say that they're almost opposites.

Thought experiment for you:

Say we remove Qanon from all platforms of reputable note. Do you believe 4chan would ever comply?

Secondly, what impact does that have on the reputable platforms vs 4chan?

How does that all break down for people?

My thoughts are:

1. 4chan will continue very liberal speech. People will continue to visit, and those numbers will increase due to the Streisand effect.

2. The number one and two responses to Alex Jones recent and wide spread ban are:

Who is next?

FINALLY!

And those trend along authoritarian lines most clearly. Anti authoritarians are more critical and make it clear they do not need to be protected from bad speech.

Authoritarians make it clear they value said protection because of what could happen.

I bet the same happens with QAnon, should that decision get made.

Net outcome:

Polarization along authoritarian lines.

Frankly, I think Jones is laughable. I also think specific speech he made should be removed because it is defamatory and or inciting in nature.

I think a blanket, "fuck this guy" is a grave error.

I think that because:

The answer to bad speech is more speech, and post removal is a form of speech, given it is used where speech is actually criminal. And it is understandable too.

Bans are not those things and can create martyrs as well as augment attention to other platforms where fans, supporters will quickly gather to discuss injustice.

I think the laughable should be laughed at too.

Civility is difficult here. Forcing that, as in nobody gets offended, dilutes speech down, and prevents "more speech" from working as it should.

That all forms a resonant cycle we probably will not like very much.

At the root of all this is forced trust and an abandonment of safe harbor. That will not be easy to undo, and it will divide people into those authoritarian vs non authoritarian camps too.

I gotta be honest and will gladly side with the anti authoritarians.

Do not need the protection, and I have a very, very thick skin. There are few ways to actually impact me, and I do understand my agency in conversation well.

I can't control others, but I can control me. Bad speech from clowns and asses is entertainment. It isnt something I give weight to. Nobody should.

That they do, and that they are enabled with this idea of protection being somehow needed is likely to do more harm than good.

Anyway, the Qanon types will find and communicate where the speech is, just as the Alex Jones types will. And then they will share that and martyr status should prove effective in rebuilding the lines of communication, only now we have doubt.

Who is next and why?

How do people know the difference between corruption and abuse of power / money from a genuine act to manage criminal speech properly?

What of things like profanity?

More basically, how do people understand they are having a real conversation as opposed to just a permitted, even encouraged one?

I want the real conversation and will seek that. Got no time for Disneyland type conversation.

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