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Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, freedom of speech is precious but

The rallying call of cryptofascists everywhere.

In reality, all societies have exceptions to free speech, such as: threats, libel, inciting riots, hate speech, asking for bribes, etc. Discussing other potential exceptions is hardly fascism.

I believe people who can construct rational arguments deserve to be heard. Generally speaking, kids themselves aren't very rational. I mean, the reason we have an educational system is to provide kids a foundation of knowledge to nurture. Why should we allow these kids access to an irrational source of knowledge that could misguide or harm them?

Sure, social media tends to bring out some negative characteristics in people, and giving air to bad or incorrect ideas. But suppressing people's rights in order to "save the children" (mirroring Christian scares from the 80s/90s) is not the answer. If it were up to me, schools would be providing kids with the tools they need to navigate modern life. Critical thinking skills and psychological tools for mental wellness for a start. Banning things should always be a last resort in my opinion because it never seems to work the way you expect, and can have chilling effects on things you may not be against. Plus the fact that it's presumptive to assume that you know what's best for everyone else on the planet.

Well, I never specifically said that content would be banned. I was mostly referencing a feed-like system where posts are generated based on an algorithm. Perhaps a ranking algorithm could be deployed to undervalue posts which lack credibility or encourage detrimental behavior? I fully agree that providing kids with the ability to navigate this terrain is a better solution.

Who’s judging credibility and detrimental behaviour? You or people with opinions you support I guess? No thanks.

Hundreds of years ago the earth being round would have been one of those not credible ideas that you would have suppressed.

Yes, and these days someone who goes around telling people that the world is flat is less than credible. If I was a parent I would inform my children that the world is, in fact, not flat and the aforementioned person is spewing nonsense. I'm not trying to force my beliefs onto others, just want people to treat themselves and others safely.

But don't you see the problem? You suppressing flat earthers seems fine to you now... in the same way that suppressing round earthers would have seemed sensible to your ancestor back then? And can you see why it would have been wrong to suppress the initial idea that the Earth was round?

"You suppressing flat earthers seems fine to you now.."

As I read it, PP advocates for ignoring those people not suppressing them. Ignoring somebody and punishing them for what they publish is not the same.

Or perhaps more importantly, the question is who does the ignoring? The user or the platform?

Personally, I think users (and not platforms) need better to tools to selectively ignore. For example, it would be great if I could mark somebody on the social network as "unreliable source" and then all people parroting or use that source (transitively through the social graph) would be (proportionally) marked unreliable as well. And vice versa, why cannot I mark things that come from people I know personally as more reliable than things that come from some Russian troll farm (or - for the balance - American astroturfing startup)?

The user is always free to ignore bad info. It's a serious problem when the platform steps in to do the disregarding for you. That is a form of censorship.

> a ranking algorithm could be deployed to undervalue posts which lack credibility

I don't know how you can spin undervaluing something automatically in an algorithm as anything but suppressing it. And it's not 'ignoring' if the person never seem them in the first place because they've been 'undervalued' in the ranking.

That's because your interpretation of the idea is wrong. The algorithm will be only taking social graph into account.. while you (end user) will have full control on how. It's not much different from undervaluing a comment on HN.

It sounds like you’re looking for a web-of-trust. Here’s an example with trust propagation: https://gist.github.com/dionyziz/e3b296861175e0ebea4b.

Not necessarily. There is no reason why this calculation on the social graph cannot be done by a central entity on your behalf. As long as the results of the calculation are transparent, I see no problem with it.

The big problem is that organizations like FB or Google want to "own" the social graph. They won't let you (except in special cases) to play with it.

I think as a civilization we have become more scientific and as a consequence, more reluctant to accept alternate truths which are not based on science. If someone could provide proof that the world is flat then their credibility would improve. However, since that proposition defies basic science, I would first have to be skeptical.

I think you're missing the point - you shouldn't censor ideas just because they are not credible. I can dig through to find my previous list of reasons why but this is the point that both myself and the other commenter are making. It's also at the core of free speech as a principle.

Also, the idea that Western civilisation itself has gotten more scientific is both wishful, and imo would be a terrible thing if it did happen. We've just traded one appeal to authority (priests) for another (pop science promoters and journalists).

Materialism is a great way to investigate natural phenomena but I would hate to live in a society that treats it as a moral principle.

I suspect that people generally don't exhibit rationality when making small daily decisions - Kahneman et al.

I think that teenagers need to practice filtering and evaluating their use of online services somehow so they can decide for themselves when things are getting out of hand. That implies some form of foundation or ground to stand on so to speak.

"I suspect that people generally don't exhibit rationality when making small daily decisions - Kahneman et al."

I wouldn't go as far to claim that they don't "exhibit rationality". I think that we are pretty rational as different beings come (we don't know of anything that comes close to human common sense). What Kahneman is talking about mostly are heuristics, which sometimes can be exploited and lead to irrational behavior.

Because wisdom comes from making mistakes, learning from them, and having context to better extrapolate and evaluate similar scenarios in the future. Censorship of the young denies them that feedback, removes agency from them, and doesn't make them wiser in the process.

But how will they know they have made a mistake when it's all they have ever known? Humanity has reached where it has because of the combined knowledge base of our ancestors. Do we really need to touch fire to realize our mistake? We don't have to relearn everything when our predecessors have already accumulated the wisdom and are willing to share.

Actually, you should relearn everything. That doesn't mean that you need to put everything into production. But re-learning everything is, IMHO, the only way to adapt.

I think there is a sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff

If you are conservative, you reduce variance (by sticking to your experience), and if you are progressive, you reduce bias (by learning new things).

> Actually, you should relearn everything. That doesn't mean that you need to put everything into production. But re-learning everything is, IMHO, the only way to adapt.

I actually agree with this! But wouldn't you say that using social media is "putting it into production"?

No, using social media is like discussing it in a meeting (it doesn't really harm anything, just wastes time). Putting it into production means to actually change the society (the laws, customs, etc.) in that way.

Negative consequences/feedback from their social group tend to do the job quite nicely, in most of the cases :-) To paraphrase the old comedian Will Rogers, there's always been three kinds of people in this world:

those who learn by reading

those who learn by observing others

but that third group just _has_ to go and pee on that electric fence.

We can't optimize society to coddle the fence-micturators 100% of the time, unfortunately. Solutions to that problem "don't scale", or get terribly fascist in a hurry.

Yeah. A free society will always have a percentage of the population who do dumb and potentially lethal things, and a percentage of those will get injured or killed because of their own stupidity.

Bu that doesn't mean the answer is to ban everything potentially dangerous. All kinds of activities nowadays (from everyday things like driving to extreme sports) carry a large degree of risk. The answer is simply to accept that freedom to make your own choices means freedom to screw up, and accept that if you're not hurting someone else, then it's your responsibility to stay safe and society won't stop you.

Not that I disagree with you, but the historical reason for a public education system was because the nature of work changed and the economy needed workers who could do more than just labour. Historical context has created much more noble goals since then :)

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