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Comment by aeternus | Hacker News Reader

Untruths and lies are rarely black and white. There was a time when the heliocentrism was considered a lie. A time when men & women being equal was considered an untruth.

If sufficient people are interested in a speaker/idea, isn't it best to let them speak and trust people to draw their own conclusions based on the information presented?

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this is a persuasive argument, in a vacuum, but to the degree which some subjects are based on objective argument, I can't say I agree. In scientific academia, the expectation is that if someone is making a claim, they also have experimentation and/or logical reasoning that can be explained which supports their claim, and is verifiable with repeated tests by secondary sources. now, some of the examples you pose fall under the murkier realms of subjective reasoning and frankly, moral relativism. Geocentrism died with the rise of societies value for objective thought, in the enlightenment. So too has the idea of the value of an individual's humanity and sentience slowly eroded away the perceived legitimacy of ideas such as racism and sexism. To many, there is the perception that granting legitimacy to ideas that run counter to the concepts of objective truth and inherent human value by giving those ideas platform is not good for society. How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.

>How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.

Yes, and whoever is making that determination gains great power. It is very easy to use this power of censorship to push an agenda. Arguments have many nuances and are rarely completely true or completely false.

Until we have a benevolent oracle that can determine whether an argument represents objective truth, free and open speech is our best option.

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