Falsehoods and the First Amendment (2019)
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[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-28/corona...
Is your hope to discredit Sunstein because you think his article in Bloomberg Opinion, written on Feb. 28, 2020, did not predict the full extent of the coronavirus?
Sunstein justifies censorship with "new findings in behavioral science", I assume he means findings about biases, such as probability neglect. So this is not just a random thing he was arrogant and wrong about, it's an illustration of the perils of dismissing people you don't agree with as biased, and of using that as justification for censoring them.
He's not dismissing them, just saying that (in his opinion) they were overestimating their actual risk. The real flaw in the article is that he gives no actual data to back up his claim that his estimate of the risk is more reliable than theirs.
It is your interpretation that it is arrogant.
Have you considered other interpretations? For example, I see Sunstein as being very interested comparing human behavior against rationality (in its various forms).
One of Sunstein's main points is that overreactions can cause more damage than the triggering event. This is a valid point, even if COVID-19 did not play out this way.
May I ask, what is your experience when reading economics-style writing? In my experience, the authors are often misinterpreted. The tend to operate at a different level of abstraction even though the words seem familar.
In this case, I don't think Sunstein is trying to call out individuals for acting irrationally. He certainly doesn't dismiss them. Knowing how people behave, he wants to build better systems to serve them. Sunstein, of all people, understands many nuances of human behavior, including risk tolerance. His 'project' (you could say) is connecting the dots between individual behavior and systemic problems.
> it's an illustration of the perils of dismissing people you don't agree with as biased, and of using that as justification for censoring them.
What do you mean by "dismissing"?
In my view, Sunstein is not "dismissing" anyone. He is describing their behavior as being irrational. Yes, I understand that people can take offense to being called irrational. But in the field of behavioral economics, discussions of rationality are not meant to insult. They are meant to inform public policy and law.
To be clear, Sunstein is not promoting censorship of people because they are biased.
I'm sure Sunstein didn't mean to offend anyone. My problem is his pattern of thinking. He sees concern about the coronavirus, he doesn't understand it, and rather then asking himself whether the people who are concerned might be right, and he wrong, he asks himself what kind of bias these poor people suffer from.
> To be clear, Sunstein is not promoting censorship of people because they are biased.
He doesn't say that anyone who is biased should be censored, but part of his justification for censorship are "new findings in behavioural economics", which I interpreted to mean findings on human irrationality and bias. And this is why I think his writing on the coronavirus is relevant: It illustrates how easy such ideas are abused, not even maliciously, but just because it's easier to explain disagreement away with the irrationality and bias of the other guy, then to ask yourself whether the other guy is right.
On what basis do you say this?
On what basis do you say this? Which of his ideas suggest that "people like him" would be doing the censoring of falsehoods? Perhaps you can explain what you mean by "people like him".
I'm not sure it's possible to restrict speech that is clearly false, harmful and should be restricted, without also opening the door to restrictions on speech that is considered undesirable, such as the aforementioned NYT ad. This is especially difficult the more complicated the potential falsehood to be considered.
> No one should anyone doubt that for some falsehoods, the marketplace works exceedingly poorly; it can be the problem, not the solution, perhaps especially online. Far from being the best test of truth, the marketplace ensures that many people accept falsehoods, or that they take mere fragments of lives, or small events, as representative of some alarming or despicable whole. Behavioral science makes this point entirely clear.
Many people recognize the benefits of (1) well-functioning markets and (b) freedom of speech. However, from this, one should not assume that their combination is necessarily wise. Put another way, one should not automatically assume that existing markets (whether it be newspapers, social media, and so on) are effective ways at promoting beneficial freedom of speech in the context of a democracy.
I disagree.
The invention (or discovery) of multiplication moved society forward. Was multiplication considered false before then?
Many other times, society often takes its time at recognizing, accepting, and implementing the true ideas.
If my FALSEHOOD had been censored, I would still be walking around with a dumb idea in my head.
This is a flimsy, oversimplified, and false argument. It stands in stark contrast to the depth of thought discussed in the paper.
Be aware, falsehood is different from lies.
> As we shall see, the plurality in Alvarez [1] was myopic in focusing largely on established categories of cases, such as libel, in which false statements of fact can sometimes be regulated or sanctioned. In the modern era in particular, other false statements, falling well short of libel, can cause serious problems for individuals and society, even if they do not fit within established categories.
The quote below gives some context about "established categories of cases" [2]:
> As a general rule, content-based restrictions on speech have been permitted only when confined to a few "historic and traditional categories of expression," such as speech likely to incite imminent lawless action, speech integral to criminal conduct, "fighting words," child pornography, fraud, and speech presenting some grave and imminent threat that the government has the power to prevent. [2]
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
[2] https://www.uscourts.gov/educational-resources/educational-a...
They pretty much already do, via many different soft levers they can pull. The problem isn't whether they can, but how can they do is effectivly and fairly?
There is an underlying question of 'should they', which will almost always essentially be 'no, but maybe we don't have a choice'.
* https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
"Freedom for the Thought That We Hate"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That...
Basically, forget universal principles (I.e. “abstract high minded-ness”) and 230 years of history and experience. Immediately change the rules based on unproven science in response to the first crisis.
This would amount to nothing more than a government takeover of speech by experts. Maybe the experts can be trusted, maybe they can’t be. Maybe they can overcome their biases, maybe they cannot. The evidence is not good. Even in the era of Trump’s outrageous obvious falsehoods, the fact checkers wandered into quite debatable territory. And especially when that happened; different speakers were not treated alike.
There is a reason only the most obvious falsehoods are outside the scope of the first amendment. Anything that requires deductive reasoning from evidence almost always bakes in assumptions and ideology. And there is a free market in people having speech that is based on different assumptions and different ideology.
It was not unknown in the framers’ day that people would be duped with falsehoods and into mass delusion. They chose to give a broad protection to free speech even in face of that knowledge.
Had rules like this been in place during the 1950s social liberalism wouldn’t have happened. We already skirted the line with things like Hollywood’s black list, which suppressed the real military threat of communism, and also anything that could ignite social change. Back then, the first amendment protected that censorship from becoming government censorship. If it had, the prospects are shocking. Do you really think a government that orchestrated the McCarthy hearings could launder any ban of “falsehoods” through a panel of duly appointed experts?
In the early to mid 20th century, when we were a technologically advanced society with real scientists, experts believed in things like eugenics. Have our experts finally gotten all the right answers? Are we truly at the end of history?
Sunstein is a brilliant guy, but his basic ideology is rule by experts, and this is exactly what it is. Maybe that idea has merit. But it’s not compatible with the first amendment.
When someone like Trump is in office who he doesn't like, then I presume that this expertise to censor "falsehoods" is supposed to be found in unelected "experts" like our social media tycoons.
"Brilliant guy"?
> But that is hardly the only reason to protect falsehoods, intentional or otherwise; there are several others. Even so, these arguments suffer from abstraction and high-mindedness; they do not amount to decisive reasons to protect falsehoods. These propositions are applied to old questions involving defamation and to new questions involving fake news, deepfakes, and doctored videos. It emerges that New York Times v. Sullivan is an anachronism, and that it should be rethought in light of current technologies and new findings in behavioral science.
Who are the experts who get to decide what counts as a "falsehood"?
For example, how many of us really know the details about how polls operate in each of the 50 states to know whether or not fraud could have occurred on such a level to affect the outcome.
For my part, I don't really care all that much because the bigger problem in this country is not whether Trump or Biden becomes our next president in a few days, but for how much (in terms of corporate campaign donations) this new administration was purchased.
Until we remove corporate donations from the election process, a lot of the candidates' campaign promises, on both sides, is just a bunch of empty rhetoric.
I would not want to bet on a near-term future that relies on public confidence in experts to function normally. It worked really, really well for the better part of the last century, but complexity and technology has grown exponentially, which makes that a less tenable system.
Prop 16, which would repeal the affirmative action ban in California, was pushed heavily by educational experts. It failed by a large margin. Here is how the Center for New American Progress, a think tank (whose CEO will lead Biden’s OMB), responded: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecond...
This is one assertion they made to support trying again with different poll wording:
> Moreover, older voters who remember the 1996 ban may hold the misleading view that the law was a “prohibition against discrimination,” as the law’s original backers framed it in this way.
This is just a play on the fact that your average person defines “discrimination” quite literally (the majority of every racial group say race shouldn’t be even a small factor in college admissions). But educational experts often have a different view of “discrimination.” Thus it’s “misleading,” the article asserts, to say that the existing provision that bans disparate treatment by race is a ban on “discrimination.”
When experts change the meaning of commonly understood words to get a different polling result, do you think that creates trust?
(FWIW, I supported repealing the ban in California initially. But when you ask people “do you want to give some people more resources, preferential treatment, etc., in order to erase historic disparities” they say “no.” I want to do that, within reason. But it’s a dog that won’t hunt. So experts keep playing with the language, coming up with terms like “equity.” And thats made me very skeptical of trusting educational experts with these new powers.)
No, it didn't. Rule by experts got us a world war, a great depression, another world war, a Holocaust, tens of millions of people killed by Communist governments and well over a billion still ruled by one in China. And that's just picking out the biggest few items.
The reason public confidence in experts is eroding is not that the experts have gotten worse. It's that the experts have lost control over the flow of information, so now they can't prevent everyone else from finding out how bad they actually are and always have been.
We so much expect professionals in these roles that it’s almost never discussed that their roles even exist. They don’t have high turnover and they’re almost never used for political football.
It’s not to say that that’s a panacea, people in comfortable professional roles don’t routinely shake things up. But making their job descriptions political isn’t the solution to that either.
For example, Fauci's decision to prioritize the value of human life, including elderly life, over the economy is one I happen to agree with ... but will not deny that there is a political dimension, as well as a moral one, in taking such a position too.
Don’t worry, this may be absurdly obviously false but it’s probably not going to get your speech regulated in any way.
Do you mean basic as in 'fundamental'? Or you mean basic as in 'what he writes reduces / is equivalent to'? Something else?
I'm not seeing either interpretation as adequately explaining Sunstein's views [1]
Where else could the drumbeat to regulate Big Tech’s fake news problem wind up taking us?
Not only that, but he ignores an obvious alternative that is staring him in the face. From the article (p. 5):
"We can better understand the problem if we note that in ordinary life, many human beings seem to follow a simple rule: people generally do not say things unless they are true, or at least substantially true."
His way of dealing with this is, as you say, rule by experts. But the obvious alternative is for people in general to stop assuming that others generally do not say things unless they are true. And the way to do that is to make people responsible for their own beliefs--to let people suffer harm if they have a false belief that they shouldn't have adopted in the first place because the source it came from was not trustworthy. Then people will have the proper incentive to actually think about the trustworthiness, or lack thereof, of various sources of information.
> Maybe that idea has merit
Based on the actual track record of "experts", I don't think it does. But Sunstein's own stated principles don't even leave room to ask the question. That's the real problem.
There are many relevant and interesting topics in this paper. They are complex, and we are likely to disagree on them. Please consider these threads as an opportunity to clarify the ideas and understand others better.
https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
But in this case, there is even more predictive and explanatory power found in Sunstein's track record. He has written extensively over a long career. His thoughts on the First Amendment are well-documented.