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Comment by stephanheijl | Hacker News Reader

A society’s mind is its marketplace of ideas, and the freer, more open, and more active that marketplace is, the sharper and clearer the giant mind is and the faster the pace of societal growth.

This is a good takeaway; even though the fringes of any discussion are generally filled with bad ideas, enabling people to have the discussion is paramount in finding the ideas that turn out to be "diamonds". It also permits us to gauge the quality of ideas that are not good allows us to consider why they are not. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

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This would be true if we were rational thinkers. We're not. There's a huge influence of emotions and irrationality on our thought processes, and the oh-so-glorious "marketplace of ideas" is thoroughly exploited by the people who capitalize on that, instead of actual good ideas.

As the obvious example: Germany in the 1920's had a really free and open marketplace of ideas, but also a lot of shitty ideas that resonated on an emotional level. In the 1930's those chickens^W ideas built the coop which they came home to roost in during the 1940's.

I don't think society as a whole has a good answer here yet (despite our large and sharp giant mind). There's universal agreement that some restrictions on free speech matter - yes, even the US has some. There's less agreement on how much. There's also not a lot of agreement if that's all it takes - I mean, Germany has taken a pretty aggressive stance on one particular kind of speech, and yet they see a recent rise in stances that sure look a lot like Nazis with subtle cosmetic changes.

Applying econ101 to that problem is a truly sophomoric approach, but it's not helpful in analyzing the actual phenomena.

The question is, does rational thought win in the long run in the marketplace of ideas, despite emotional thought also benefiting from the marketplace? I believe it does. That's why human rights move forwards overall, not backwards.

I'll refer to Steven Pinker's excellent books for much deeper details on this.

You ignore the cost of "organically" figuring out the good from the bad. This is the same problem with free market economics. There are many ways of discovering the correct price/cost/idea. On one extreme, you have those who say that we should let people figure it out on their own without any kind of inhibition. But that kind of method comes at the greatest cost because essentially it's nothing but brute-forcing the solution, except human life is at stake and will be lost multiple times before the correct solution is found. It is pretty obvious that there is a more optimal method, than just letting laymen, with no knowledge on the subject matter, just try to walk blindly into the solution. I would say, that is maybe one of the meanings of what it means to be civilized; to figure out ever more optimal methods to search for solutions in all areas of life.

I don't think I'm ignoring the cost. Rather, I'm thinking that it's the mechanism most likely to arrive at a correct conclusion. Think of scientific method, by comparison... it's slow, inefficient, and expensive, but it's more likely to be correct than common sense is, and certainly more likely to be correct than faith or ideology.

Leaving it to "experts", and shushing the rabble, makes you vulnerable to the experts. At which point, you want experts you agree with and don't want those you disagree with, based on your lack of expertise. This is just a triumph of authoritarianism and ideology. Which, if it turns out to be correct, is awesome. But what if it's wrong?

This is where Dunning-Krueger shows up uninvited...

Restrictions on speech are usually less about arriving at a correct conclusion, and more on serving those in power. See Ag-gag laws, China and Russia, the since overturned criminalization of inciting people to resist the draft in the US (that gave us the "fire in a crowded theater" quote), the un-American Activities Committee, and all manner of state-sponsored propaganda.

To ask "will they get it right?" is misleading - they won't even try.

Heh. And I was trying to be polite about it, but you're absolutely right.

Steven Pinker's books are... let's say subject to much criticism. (For a good summary: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/steven-pinke...)

But yes, that's the big question - does rational thought win in the long run? We don't know. And there are indications that some of the "fringe" thoughts that are irrational and harmful have the potential to collapse the marketplace of ideas before they get sorted into the mainstream. (In which case, we, at best, get to start from scratch)

You can look at the collapse of progress in the dark ages. You can look at how dangerously close the world was to a different outcome in WW2. You can look at authoritarianism to day and ask the question "if most of the world swung that way, how would we ever escape that grasp"

And even if it does win in the long run, is there some way we can bias the marketplace away from fringe ideas? Should we? What qualifies as fringe?

All of these are important questions. None of these can be addressed by pretending free expression is really econ101. (Just because we call it a marketplace doesn't really make it one)

The article makes it very clear how the marketplace itself biases against fringe ideas, and the path fringe ideas must take to become mainstream. That was the whole point of it!

As for the critique of Pinker... by focusing on the past few decades, rather than the past few millennia (as Pinker does), it greatly misses the point on many things. If you've read Pinker, you'll see how. If you're just reading critiques of Pinker, well. I have my gripes with him too, but that article is just strawman arguments for the most part.

I agree. The article's key takeaway is that "Mute buttons in any form should raise red flags".

Mute buttons and blocks are a survival technique for some people.

Survival from what - or in what way?

Ignoring a bad idea does not make it go away.

Some people face challenges to their very right to exist online. Muting the people who say such things is easier than fighting or coping.

Look up spoon theory for a practical explanation.

I'm an overweight gay male probably on the autism spectrum with learning disabilities, I don't really like effectively being lectured on my privilege.

You'll never change the conversation if you don't engage with it - its perfectly fine to step away from time to time, but unplugging and living in your own reality serves no one.

I'm not trying to lecture you or tell you what to do. I'm saying this is why some people do what they do.

If you're saying that people who feel a need to block threatening voices shouldn't do so, who's lecturing, exactly?

Read further down though! He gets to the self-cleaning of the marketplace through "Gauntlets" – that unpopular opinions will be attacked, but if there's truth to them and they stand, they'll eventually be accepted and become mainstream (ex: "smoking causes cancer" from 1940 -> 1960)

The cigarette story is a story of the MPI doing its job. It’s a story of a needle of truth rising up from a haystack on the fringes of the big brain’s consciousness and piercing its way through a century-long barrage of gauntlet attacks until it had conquered the Thought Pile mountain and become the mainstream, status quo viewpoint.

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