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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Free speech is pessimistic as heck. It's saying that good ideas don't necessarily win, but if you allow authoritarians to engage in arbitrary censorship then bad ideas will always win. Censoring free speech is not just a "crude authoritarian's" move; it's what all authoritarians do whenever they feel they can get away with it. And censorship won't save you from propaganda either: there's a lot of crude propaganda in every totalitarian regime, happily coexisting with censorship of every other point of view!

Free speech is NOT a problem: it's a very real safeguard against critical threats. If you treat it like one, you haven't seriously engaged with the issue.

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Well, traditionally according to political philosophy, free speech is most associated with John Stuart Mill who did praise it out of optimism. That is the common understanding of it.

I'm not sure what philosophical viewpoint you're referring to when you describe it as "pessimistic as heck".

If you want to seriously engage with the issue, the article explores a lot of aspects of it, and why 100% unfettered free speech is potentially a problem to democracy.

Mill promoted free speech realistically as better than the alternative, is how I'd put it. Here's where he made his case; it's not too long to read: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

But he lived well before the age of the internet and maybe, you know, just maybe when the world changes we should adapt to it rather than to dogmatically hold that what one person thought a couple of hundred years ago should be enshrined and never ever be changed lest the sky falls down.

Maybe, you know, just maybe we can learn something from people writing on timeless issues, even if they wrote before the lastest technological change.

In that case, let's make the bible our literal guide and get it over with.

Of course you can learn something from people writing on timeless issues. But by making them the dogmatic truth you get locked in.

I completely agree that citing authority is not an argument. I only contend here that the GP made an inaccurate summary in dismissing Mill's argument; and that argument is only one chapter, not the whole book as you might think from the way it's cited. You might find it pretty on point: he wrote in Victorian times which were also a local maximum of social pressure to profess the correct thoughts. Also a time with unprecedented new media (though I don't recall that topic coming up in this chapter).

I find it hilarious that my comment got flagged by - supposedly - the proponents of free speech.

Sigh, humans are gonna human.

One of the problems with suppressing criticism of even things that are completely true and right, as Mill points out, is that people come to believe the true thing in only a hollow way. I've been thinking that may have happened to the doctrine of free speech itself in the U.S. -- becoming just a slogan kids learn to parrot in school. Hollow it enough and it's easily lost.

(Added: I found I could unflag your comment. I think the snark was undeserved but it wasn't nearly enough for flagging.)

I think you're well past that stage already. Plenty of people parrot the founders as though they had some kind of divine insight into what makes a good state, rather than to see political systems as subsequent attempts to learn from mistakes made in the past. It is very well possible that 'free speech' should be sacrosanct, but the US is doing a piss-poor job of showing that that is the case.

Political systems come and they go, so far the 'free speech' countries are not doing remarkably better than the countries with some limitations on free speech and it would be good to recognize this and to see what can be learned from each other rather than to put dogma first.

Variation in laws and norms is a valuable teacher, and there's a lot of shallow faith in the civic religion, agreed on that much. I'm kind of too lazy to argue with you here about the rest.

The affordances of social media could be much better designed for preserving the memetic edge the more true ought to have over the more false; OTOH the way Twitter and Facebook are going about this attempt at reform is heavy-handed folly that's already backfiring. (http://www.islandone.org/Foresight/WebEnhance/HPEK1.html from the 1980s shows by example that it is possible to think ahead about societal consequences of the design of communications media. That particular paper focused on more scholarly publishing, but it's not like that's unimportant either.)

I think the problem is advertising. Advertising causes media to focus on the controversy because it is what drives engagement. Business-as-usual would not drive engagement nearly as much as outrage does.

How do you know why you got flagged or by whom?

It typically shows 'flagged' in the line above the comment.

But you said you were flagged by the proponents of free speech. How would you know that?

FWIW this proponent didn't even downvote it, though I was kind of irritated by the 'dogmatic', etc.

Is that improper use of the word? I thought it came close enough to the intended meaning.

No. Principles are there precisely for when the world changes.

> dogmatically hold that what one person thought a couple of hundred years ago should be enshrined and never ever be changed lest the sky falls down.

You know what's great about free speech? It's great at holding dogma at bay.

How do you challenge dogma without free speech?

Exactly, in fact it doesn't even matter what comes out of it there is simply no alternative to Free Speech that could work. Free Speech at least can work that's more than any other concept has to offer.

Free speech is a Monte Carlo method - it certainly delivers a probably good solution.

But there's no guarantee that it will. When people argue that free discourse will eventually always end up at the "best" place (whatever they define "best" to be) it almost sounds like some kind of appeal to a diety.

Everything you said is 100% true.

Anyone who tries to take this right, or any other right, away from you is planning to, in the long run, kill you. History tells us this very clearly.

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