Hacker News Reader

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre that could lead to a stampede that puts people in danger. Deliberately misinforming people about the risk of an action they are about to take could be too.

This reply already gives too much credit to the original claim. The acoustic vibrations generated by mouth sounds could physically cause damage, like an opera singer breaking glass, or shouting next to a microphone.

This is an unrelated and poor interpretation of the claim.

After re-reading and self-reflecting, I do not agree. The original claim is about defining certain actions as intrinsically not side-effectful (no sounds can themselves be dangerous), but actions having side-effects cannot be considered in isolation of the physical and social circumstances they are embedded in, which can require restricting an action.

I think my reply really adequately responds to the core intent of the original comment.

I’d also like to point out that your reply is not helpful. Merely gainsaying something is not useful or informative.

Bringing up opera singers breaking glass as an example of sound vibrations physically hurting people is just not useful in a conversation about freedom of speech because it’s a nitpicky convoluted example that is not a great thing to bring up when you’re trying to redefine the claim so that you could rebut it. (Note that I am specifically talking about the example you brought to to support your interpretation of the claim. I’m fine with your speculation that the claim literally meant something along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones” rather than “free speech has never had adverse consequences”. It just didn’t need your qualification. I do appreciate the self-reflection, though.)

I'd argue that the orignal sentence was using 'sounds' a bit symbolically, so the clearer interpretations would be closer to "there are no communications I can utter that are dangerous".

His point being about the critical thinking on the part of the listener, not about the physics of making actual sounds.

A communication costs energy to transmit. It cannot be decoupled from physical circumstance. But it’s beside the point. The communication is still embedded in a context of the situation it’s in.

If you utter a communication to an insane person, the side effect might be that you are stabbed. You as the person uttering it must take responsibility for what neurophysical response in the mind of the listener might result.

If you emit communications, there can be consequences which are causal. Not strictly the volitional responsibility of the listener.

I hate when people use this metaphor. Not because it's inaccurate to say that speech can cause imminent harm in some circumstances. But because its origin was a Supreme Court opinion that argued against the right to speak out against the draft in WW1, which I don't think too many people using this analogy today would agree with. Also, this legal argument has been rejected since then.

Point is, this exact argument could be (and has been) used to justify some pretty bad ideas.

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

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

Now open your mouth and make the sounds "education is bad, our young people are being corrupted by an educational elite that is destroying America".

Thank god those sounds aren't dangerous.

It's about differentiating (i.e. creating a distance) between speech and our reaction to it, or, in other words, it's about taking responsibility for our reactions.

In my opinion, prohibition of symbols, under the premise that they're subversive, like the Nazi ones, is one of the biggest cultural blunders of our time. It castrates entire generations of the possibility to experience the difference between ideas and their effect on us. It is ceding to the symbols, saying "you have power over us, with which we cannot come to terms with, the only thing we can do is prohibit your use".

The seeming culture-wide inability to discuss politics, religion or other dividing topics in a constructive way is part of the same phenomenon, in my view.

Just to be clear - are you asserting that any abuse and threats to anyone should be tolerated? Or are you drawing the line somewhere?

In that sense everything is dangerous and the word 'dangerous' is nearly meaningless. Just because the idea is stupid and it would be dangerous if people take it seriously doesn't mean saying it should be treated as dangerous.

We can cope with people saying stupid things. It happens regularly.

> In that sense everything is dangerous

No. Open your mouth and utter the sounds ‘water is wet’ demonstrate how these words are dangerous. It is ludicrous to assert that all sentences are equally liable to be dangerous

The issue is that 'danger' is in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of people who would love to ban advocacy of Socialism or Communism. There are people who want to ban 'hurtful' speech. And people who want to ban 'blasphemous' speech. In the end, they are all self-interested parties who want to ban speech that they disagree with. There is no magic wand that can ban harmful speech without creating a framework for authoritarian meddling, with very few exceptions, which are already on the books.

As much as I admire Sacha Baron Cohen's efforts to uncover hypocrisy of our society, I agree with your comment and disagree with him - that social platforms have to filter content; just on the basis that this filtering, even if done with good intentions initially, may later be seized by individuals with their own agendas, which may not at all be virtuous.

If we mute people talking about races and skin color, prohibit to single out minorities, do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?

I don't trust people with the kind of power filtering provides. I'd rather error on being open and free.

But Facebook already filters content in various ways. They boost content according to its engagement which downgrades/hides the other content from your feed. They sell targeted ads to the highest bidder which implies that you do no see the ads of the other bidders.

If Facebook would just stop manipulating and selling your attention it would have a better defense against calls to filter the content on it.

> do we actually relieve the pressure in the society, or help build it up to a radical level and fuel even more hatred that way?

Bad ideas spread through exposure.

For freedom of speech to be important for any reason, it must have the power to effect change.

If speech can effect change, how can you be sure it is incapable of being dangerous?

You accept the danger or stifle it with more speech.

Reflexively, the only way to neuter the danger of speech is to suppress everything that isn't already accepted. Then nobody can effect change on the grounds that change might be harmful.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

This might just be revealing a lack of imagination on your part. I'd argue the opposite: there are sounds you can make with your mouth that can change the course of history.

You are free to walk into a police station and tell them you are about to open fire.

If you don't have a gun, your hands are clearly visible, and you make no threatening actions, the worst they had better do is get you gently into a quiet room and arrange a psych eval.

Which dovetails perfectly with the intent of the OP... police just as much, or arguably even more, than every other person, need to think about what they here and not just knee jerk respond.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous.

So you're arguing that Osama Bin Laden, who did not himself commit violent acts but merely persuaded others to do so, was in fact not dangerous?

I argue that Facebook isn't a dumpster fire. I use it mostly to share photos with my friends and family, and I see little or no propaganda on my feed.

(Agree with your other points.)

Ill jump on this one too and say I am consistently impressed with the engineering quality of their teams, and appreciate their contributions to open source communities. The scale and up-time of their product over its lifetime is impressive, as is their ability to make so many underlying changes and survive with the same user interface for a decade each iteration.

> I argue that Facebook isn't a dumpster fire. I use it mostly to share photos with my friends and family, and I see little or no propaganda on my feed.

So Facebook, a site used by hundreds of millions of people, is fine because... you don't see any propaganda?

> But differentiating between freedom of speech and "reach" is just as dangerous as...

I don't think so.

> those people are dangerously ignorant.

I think that is a gross oversimplification.

Much of the repulsive vile speech, such as hate speech, is generally festered among a group bouncing their ideas off each other. You may or may not label such groups as echo chambers. Part of the reason for this is that many people find comfort organizing into groups and generally fear/distrust originality. In other words many people value conformance more than the message to which they are conforming because an idea or message gains credibility the less original it appears and because there is security in numbers.

Mild changes of technology will not instantaneously cure original hateful speech any more than it will instantaneously modify behavior in advance or increased originality or critical thinking. It can, however, vastly alter the reach of that speech allowing vile ideas to proliferate or be constrained to faithful believers.

The balance there is if you modify technology to open wider reach then all speech, including vile hate speech and conspiracy theories, are widely available. If you modify technology to restrict reach then all speech is restricted including objective research and educational material.

My personal solution is to just avoid the online swamps where people congregate merely for the point of gathering and try not to worry about the loud volume of amplified stupidity that leaks out. When the stupidity confronts me in the real world I respond as directly as I can without regard for making people feel stupid or embarrassed, because I generally presume when people bring the full force of unoriginal ideas to me conversationally they do so in a quest to solve their personal insecurities. Don't waste time with stupid.

There are indeed sounds you can make that are dangerous, here are some examples: 1. Follow this instructions to build a bomb with materials bought at a drug store: ...... 2. There's an American spy in North Korea going by the name Ichi working at ... 3. (As a woman) Michael raped me (when he didn't).

Work on "fundamental" issues takes time and no one has stopped working on education.

But in the current environment noise and distraction is incentivized and amplified and that makes things like education even more complicated and time consuming.

Just break the advertising business model. Literally that's it. Don't allow data sharing with advertisers, and don't allow political advertising, solved. Overnight the internet's better.

Now you just have to define data, data sharing, advertiser, political, advertising, and political advertising in a way that can be affected by such a policy without all the obvious and non-obvious harms.

> If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

With reeducation camps reappearing in parts of the world and sensitivity, bias and other types of training in other parts ... that makes me somewhat uncomfortable as idea. The ones in power always want to educate the wrongthinkers.

And judging how easily Democrats learned to hate everything Trump related and before them Republicans - everything Obama, and hating each other - I would say that it is not a problem with education. People hate because it is fun and pleasurable.

I think a direct comparison between Obama and Trump is a bit dishonest. Obama did some bad things, sure, but Trump's behaviour is unprecedented.

I am not comparing Trump to Obama, I am comparing the Dem/Rep reaction. There were two minutes of hate before the inauguration.

> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" - dril (https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312)

That's why Cohen's speech is all the more important. To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true. Filtering out misinformation from fact and opinion means those political parties can still have their debates where they slam their opponents but they cannot make lies nor baseless allegations.

The problem we have these days is it's become impossible for the casual observer to separate fact from fiction. Which then just encourages people to take information spread within their own echo chamber at face value (since, rightly or wrongly, that's the network they trust). If we can at least remove the falsehoods from the conversation that is a step forward in having open debates.

Someone will no doubt point out that there's a fuzzy line between a lie and something that is true but intentionally misleading, so where do you draw the line. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to that. However I personally believe things have gotten bad enough where it's now worth the trying.

>To be clear, I don't agree with everything he said but he is absolutely right that there are some facts that are objectively true

Like the fact that "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" ? Who decides what is fact and what misinformation. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman - this is objectively true for half the society, bullshit for the other half. Who decides?

Caitlyn Jenner?

"Objectively true" doesn't mean "people believe it to be true" (that's "subjective" not "objective"). "Objectively true" means there's a body of evidence that supports it being true. So the question shouldn't be "who decides what's true?" but rather "what evidence is there to support a claim?"

I've got no issue with subjective content so long as it isn't intentionally harmful but when content is objectively false (the example Cohen used was Holocaust deniers -- there's a body of evidence which proves the Holocaust did happen) it's probably better it was removed. Newspapers, for example, are often forced to write retractions when courts find them to be dishonest.

Where the blurred line lies isn't the "who" behind the moderation but the "where". Where do you draw a line between content that is untrue and content that is technically true but written in an extremely dishonest way? Do we define things as a strictly boolean state (ie only objectively false content gets removed) or is there a state in the middle where content that is not objectively false but still hugely dishonest can also be removed.

For example the UK Brexit slogan "We send £350 million to the NHS, lets fund the NHS instead" was not objectively false (well, the figure they published was untrue but lets ignore that for the purpose of this example) but it was also dishonest because it suggest the EU membership fee would fund the NHS if we left the EU and the actual truth is that almost certainly wouldn't happen. So should dishonest content be removed also when it is as damaging as something objectively false?

That's such a dangerous precedence to take however I'm also not convinced the status quo is working either because people currently game the system and it does have massive repercussions.

Freedom of speech is important primarily and especially because it is a powerful force - not because it's not.

The fact that you think Cohen "bent to knee" sounds creepy to me, like you're implying some secret Jewish cabal that made him do it. It reminds me of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

What exactly has Cohen ever said that's anti-Semitic? The racism in his work, like Borat, is satire. If anything, he should've offended Kazakhs by implying they ignorantly hate Jews.

> There are no sounds that I can make with my mouth that are dangerous. If people are easily convinced to hate other people, the problem is not dangerous speech or ideas. The problem is a breakdown in fundamental education, i.e., those people are dangerously ignorant.

OK, so let's say we agree that the fundamental problem is lack of education. That's great in theory, but that doesn't solve a problem today.

There are societies where unfettered lies about groups caused genocides. You can lament the poor education that contributed, but that doesn't change the fact that it can happen again.

The real issues are that lies are much harder to undo than they are to create; that many people are resource-poor, under-educated, and susceptible to lies; and that we have a biological tendency toward out-group violence that requires a thick layer of socialization to counteract.

Nothing FB is doing is threatening speech in the US. If you want them to have less power over the broadcast of speech, I'm on your side, and I'll be voting for people who want to break them up and decrease Zuckerberg's power.