Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control.

This is the really tricky part, though... absolute free expression only prevents people from enacting total control if it persists; however, free speech is not something that can’t be undone.

This is a form of the paradox of tolerance. If people use their absolute free speech to push lies and propaganda that allows them to gain enough control to then suppress future free speech and maintain their own power, we are no longer protected by free speech.

Even if you believe truth always eventually wins out if free speech is allowed, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hit a point along that path where free speech is restricted, and our meandering path towards truth suddenly stops.

Now, I don’t think restricting free speech is the answer, but we can’t pretend that it is impossible for people to use their power of free speech to prevent free speech in the future.

That is why you need an educated populace. By educated, we mean one that can think critically and independently rather than a college credential.

We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.

College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method?

I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education but one of them was being taught how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)

Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.

I wouldn't put MDs on such a high pedestal. They're people who specialize, just like people in many other professions, and having little knowledge of statistics beyond an (oft-forgotten) undergraduate-level course wouldn't surprise me. It's a different story for doctors who go the research route rather than practicing medicine, of course.

My classmates who went on to become medical doctors were no smarter and possibly less ethical. What they had was the family circumstances to delay gratification. Sometimes this was family wealth to support them for years, other times it was the family pooling their resources for one chosen member of the family, other times it was the family wealth to support them going to a lower tier medical school, and lastly it was family members who got them positions. I really hated the guy who cheated in honors English and went on to become a doctor.

Turning your descendants into doctors and lawyers is one of the traditional ways families use to preserve their wealth. It isn’t because these people were smarter.

> how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)

FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.

Though I do agree with your point. The number of college graduates does not equate to higher critical thinking of a nation's populace.

I did attend a journalism class almost a decade ago. Even though the powerful effects of mass media on people were likened to a magic bullet [0] It would be correct to assume that social media tech today has transcended this very capability and in more powerful ways than ever imaginable by its inventor.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model

> FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.

There certainly are more forms and techniques of advertising, but if you teach the fundamentals sufficiently well, the critical thinking skill set can adapt as advertising adapts.

An important fundamental is to recognise that you have a desire for a product or service and to know to be conscious of the chain of events that have led to that desire.

You mean tracking? Advertisements themselves didn't change. And you don't need any complex countermeasure, just knowing that the information not trustworthy is enough for all practical purposes and for all information sources. People who fall for lies have only one wrong assumption: that the information they receive is trustworthy, once that one is out, it stops working for good.

I think integrity might be what you're aiming toward. When people are taught to live integrous lives and manage to do so, they are more able to see a lack of integrity when it comes.

So if level of schooling achieved is not a good metric for education, what is?

Even if everyone experiences the same schooling, everyone isn’t going to be equally educated.

> We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world.

Keeping children in school for 12 years doesn't mean they are educated.

Keep in mind that between 7-9% of school-age children in the US are homeschooled.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

James Madison, The Federalist Papers

Germany in the early 1930s was one of the best, most rigorously educated nations in the world.

It was also crushed by weight of enormous economic crisis.

Smart people pushed to the wall will be more dangerous than stupid(ish) people who have something to lose.

It’s almost as if education is a proxy for being a social conformist. But people still think school cures groupthink. It does the opposite by definition.

Education isn’t a panacea. Think about how there’s the stereotype of pro-Confederates as ignorant hillbillies but then look at who reacts whenever someone suggests not having an inaccurate statute in a public place or naming a U.S. military base after someone who fought against the U.S. military. You’ll find people with Ph.Ds arguing to protect that, not because they’re incapable of learning but because they were deliberately educated with incorrect information and, since the results haven’t harmed them personally, will use their critical thinking and analytic skills to mount as strong a defense as they can. Thinking “critically and independently” is also how people who believe in creationism, are anti-vaccination, climate change deniers, opposed to public health practices during the pandemic, etc. explain their beliefs, too, often sincerely.

I’m not sure how to break that cycle. It seems to require some kind of forcing function which pushes the topic into verifiable facts and logic but that’s hard to against opposition and only works when things are fairly clear-cut (e.g. you can show Robert E. Lee was a bad person from historical records but it’s not easy to objectively prove the causes of poverty or crime rates).

This is why the value of free speech needs to be protected. If enough people holds this value then it becomes difficult for anyone to change it.

Right, lies and propaganda only have to win once.

> only have to win once.

I disagree. If you notice with American politics both sides believe in strong dogmas. There is no middle ground.

They both have made their beds and they will lay in it.

Corporate Dems (control the Democratic Party) and the MAGA (control the GOP) have their own ecochambers. MSNBC, CNN, etc indoctrinate the Dems. Talk radio for the GOP.

The two cults will continue to clash. I wonder if the people will wake up.

I wonder if the people will wake up.

The "wake up" approach doesn't seem to be working, but we do need some way of reforming our society around the idea of the mighty middle that is not represented by the extremes.

Or maybe a middle that's not dominated by dogma or ideologies. There's many pieces of truth located pretty far from the center of various political ideologies, but the ideologies taken as a whole also contain a stunning amount of falsehood and simplification.

I would hope we could have both. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the policy platforms of any politicians who have claimed to be in the middle.

Being left or right doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw reason and critical thinking out the window. Being an extremist, sure; devotion to dogma is often a feature of extremism, but that's not the same thing.

Or we need to stop using words like fascism, tyranny, racist just because someone disagrees with us. That shift to cooler more informative language is just as difficult for educated people. Even on HN, so many threads devolve into Godwin’s law. I will say that one exception is education about human cognition. Trying to reason without a strong grasp of our own psychology and good ways of framing epistemological problems is like writing software without regard to hardware. Useful to some extent but prone to unforseen gotchas.

having two strong parties seems like an inevitable artifact of first past the post voting (lesser of two evils thinking, "wasted" votes, etc.), and unless "the people" can constitutionally get something like ranked choice voting done federally, i'm not sure what the way forward is. any thoughts?

> any thoughts?

I'm an independent. I like some of the ideas of the Right that they believe that States are governments to experiment with. I'd suggest FPTP and other solutions to just attempt to do this locally and in a State or two. It will get traction, if it's worth it to the governed population. That's my suggestion, start small.

> I like some of the ideas of the Right that they believe that States are governments to experiment with

That's mostly feels like just all talk, though. A concrete example: California would love to do some health care experiments, including going single-payer. However, the state can't do so without permission from the federal government to use Medicare funding in different ways (obviously there is no way a state could fund something like that itself without state-level tax increases that would never get past the electorate). GOP-controlled Congress would never go for that, in part because they don't want to be seen by their base as "supporting socialism", and also in part (I'm conjecturing here) that they're afraid that it'll work and they'll be proven wrong.

From the GOP's perspective it more seems like "states should experiment... as long as they're experiments we agree with".

Nope. As long as there is potential for other powers to grow or counteract it, you have a chance to course correct. Isn’t that what a vote is good for?

I think it ends up being the pendulum swinging farther to the other side than really correcting whenever we see a switch.

A vote isn’t good for anything if violent extremists can overturn an election.

Sure, but being able to vote is not guaranteed, either. If the propaganda wins out, they can stop allowing votes.

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