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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

> Leaded gasoline, phlogiston, cold fusion, phrenology, scientific racism, basically the entire history of the progress of science.

The progress of science wasn't driven by nutjobs delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. Almost all of it was driven by careful peer review of ideas -- which is the exact opposite of unrestricted speech.

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Those ideas were originated by careful peer review of ideas— they were put into practice by unrestricted discussion proliferating throughout the populous.

Peer review being so widespread and regarded as necessary is remarkably recent, and it's not at all clear that it's necessary or terribly effective for science.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the... has some indications that peer reviewers generally don't do a great job.

"E pur si muove...!"

Galileo didn't deliver spittle-flecked rants either. He carefully gathered evidence and wrote it up, and his ideas gained acceptance by peer review.

Let's have a word about gay rights then. Once upon a time a pride parade full of rainbow hair dye and BDSM leather and face paint and drag queens and hairy-chested shirtless men would have been right next to your "spittle-flecked rants" in the proper gentleman's book of ways not to get your message out, but I wouldn't want to be the one to say that they should have been censored over it.

Not everybody is a traditional upperclass gentleman and not everybody who isn't is wrong.

But that's not actually how it worked out. Gay marriage didn't go from an unpopular stance to a popular one throughout the 2000s by displays like this. If anything, they were used as ammunition by people strongly against gay marriage in order to slow the change in public opinion.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-ri...

First you show the world you exist and convince your friends it's worth trying to change things, then you convince the moderates, then you win the fight, then you wait for your bitter enemies to die because they'll never be convinced but at least their kids are open to new ideas.

Pissing off your bitter enemies can be hard to avoid and still get the job done.

But this article is making my exact point. By the time gay marriage was actually gaining acceptance, the largest pride parades had become as tame as 4th of July celebrations, with SF pride marching with the police, the mayor, and Google employees. They're completely different from their predecessors, like the Stonewall riots.

Because it's a different stage of the fight. You don't start off having a parade with the mayor in it because the mayor won't give you the time of day until your movement is big enough to be taken seriously, which starts with getting noticed and getting out the base. Being bland and studious doesn't do that.

And the parades are still full of weirdos, but they won, so now it's okay.

The point stands that even these seemingly "queer", radically expressed ideas clearly became a lot tamer, less insolently-stated and more agreeable over time, despite the lack of anything approaching real censorship. That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

> That's precisely what you want if you care about not harming society at large, especially in the longer run.

Please, explain: how do queer ideas harm society, in the longer run?

My whole point is that censorship is what harms society, not ideas themselves.

Regardless of whether they helped public perception, should they have been censored until public opinion caught up?

Actually, Galileo did largely deliver self-aggrandizing spittle-flecked rants, full of personal attacks against other astronomers, which were complete rubbish. His arguments for why the Earth revolved around the Sun were complete nonsense, and were more theological, than scientific in nature.

His contemporaries were not particularly impressed, but he probably wouldn't have been censored, if he also didn't try his damned hardest to personally piss off everyone in his social circle.

His 'efforts' probably set the adoption of heliocentrism back by decades.

Interesting, do you have further reading on this to recommend?

If you have a few hours to kill, page through this:

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

And Isaac Newton did a lot of work in alchemy, occult studies and predictions of the apocalypse founded in the period equivalent to the "Bible code". I don't know why people assume that the foremost scientists in recorded history did not benefit from an overall intellectually-open social climate and worldview. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Galileo in particular was prosecuted by the Catholic church for making spittle flecked rants against the Pope. Much like a modern YouTuber, he then pretended he was persecuted for his science.

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