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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

>First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform level

The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO.

Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

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It's ironic (or maybe appropriate) that this, talking about how better ideas don't rise to the top, is the top comment. The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc).

The strawman of the existence of factually incorrect content is irrelevant in my view. Everyone loves to jump on conspiracy theories or whatever other stuff is out there as proof that people (other people) are too dumb to be exposed to the world. First, I think the relevance and the number of serious adherents in the extreme version of these conspiracies etc are dramatically overstated because they reinforce a narrative. Second, I think most of it is an effect, not a cause, of people being told what to do and what to think. People uncomfortable with narratives that end in them giving something up will take shelter in alternative explanations. The problem is not the nutty theories being available, it's in the way that one group forces itself on another in the first place.

All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

> The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us"

Not what I said. However the idea that everyone is equally able to parse out good information from bad is absurd, and I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

> we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide.

Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

But no, of course, you're right, taking any action at all is akin to fascism. Totally.

I don't understand how one could look at the current state of affairs regarding rampant misinformation online and say "yeah this is the best we can do without compromising our ideals". Its not good enough.

I think that's the real issue in all of this discussion: there is simply no will.

It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom.

My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over nazi germany. My other grandfather served in Europe after that whole debacle. I feel I have as much right as anyone to say that it's bullshit going on Reddit and running into the same hateful misinformation on every thread, of "arguing" with holocaust deniers on conspiracy that think Sly Stallone kisses dolphins, use the same canards they've been suing for 2k years, and I can promise you were the first to notice my crypto-Jewishness. These same dummies love Q and have never found covid information that fit their narrative that they didn't love.

We really gonna relitigate (and lose) historical issues like the Holocaust for the next 10,000 years? We gonna sit by and whine about "principles" as people are murdered on a daily basis because of misinformation like that? That's not good enough.

What marketplace of ideas? How many serious challenges have there been to big tech by any company in the last decade? What freedom is there if you can't walk out your front door without being directly impacted by disinformation of various kinds on a daily basis?

I'm sorry but I don't quite understand how Reddit--a bastion for young 20-somethings, among which leftism is a major demographic, could ever be construed as a Q-Anon stronghold.

I feel as though this may more reflect your fears than the state of the site, and I feel as though so reflexively writing off a population that already largely agree with you illumines the opposite argument--that reaction to speech is largely an overreaction, and we will, without careful consideration, largely consider any bloc to be constituted of what we fear.

You seem to be projecting onto me what you think I'm projecting. ;)

I didn't call it a stronghold. There are certain subreddits that were aligned. The donald before it moved, conspiracy, conservative, etc. You ever see the greatawakening subreddit where they were acting like Trump was giving secret messages in speeches and calling for executions?

If that exists on a site with leftism as a major demographic, what does it look like elsewhere? You're making my point for me.

BTW, one of the longest-running mods of conspiracy that finally got banned has admitted that they are a Russian national. Not that this means anything, but it's interesting that a subreddit could be dominated by an individual with such strong beliefs about politics in another country.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/r-conspiracy-axolotl-peyotl-b...

To give context, I'm very much what some people would mock as an "enlightened centrist" (I felt so sad when I realized this is bad?). I think much of the "hateful mistinformation" is actually more aligned torwards the left. I can't read a thread about pitbulls or my home state without people frothing at the mouth and acting like my dog should be put down today or that my state is an ISIS stronghold.

But consitutionally? If someone is being an asshole on your property, it's your right to kick them off.

I don't believe I am, though--you are, if I'm not mistaken, asserting that it's some prolific iniquitous undercurrent which these platforms are subtending in some manner. (Which would seem somewhat misleading to me, as your assertion that r/TheDonald moved was of their own volition, rather than a banning by the site.)

Any platform harboring content will, as a matter of course, simply through the caprice of a moderator, let slip by insane opinions--but opining that these are some growing tide and, more dangerously, representative of their moderate counterparts (a la the r/Conservative subreddit, which seems constituted of largely by-the-numbers right of centers,) seems disrespectful to all parties involved and serves only to distract from your central assertion that communicating these ideas will in some way seed wanton chaos. (Comparing the ideas directly to those that precipitated the tragedy of the Holocaust.)

Edit, as I'd written my reply to a previous version of your own: I am sympathetic to the idea that seeing these more fringe ideals is unfortunate--but the argument which I believe bears greater importance is that acting in this manner against them, striking them from the whole of our public discourse and pre-empting any who could, in some way, divine inspiration from the muck is far more deleterious to discourse. It serves all too easily as a means to silence disquiet and cast a veneer of unanimity.

I think the number of discussions that are off-limits should be very small and platforms should be much much more transparent.

However, if allowing certain discussions means also allowing other discussions, I'm not broken up if sites like reddit were to ban a subreddit like conspiracy or at least try to reshape it to something much more objective.

If the owners a property decide certain views are abhorrent, that's their right, I can't think of a valid moral or legal complaint against that - it is their property. If we lack competition that is an issue of market competitiveness more than propaganda.

You're correct in that it's really a market capture problem as things are. But the popular proposals that try to co-opt Big Tech into the censorship game are popular precisely because of that market capture - it's a way to make it extensive without putting the government in charge of it explicitly.

So we can't really treat these two as completely separate right now. Indeed, if those schemes are allowed to go forward, the next thing you'll hear is that we can't break Facebook etc up, because doing so will limit how effectively some information can be suppressed. The more power is concentrated, the more it seeks to sustain that state of affairs, and the better it is at that - so why would we hand those companies so much power when they already are a major problem?

Who decides what's off limit?

Whoever makes that decision for each platform.

There're certainly multiple places one could draw the line--the efficacy of a given position for these sorts of things varies by your objective or simply the severity one perceives.

Thanks a ton for providing the opportunity for some discussion on this!

Who is being murdered on a daily basis because of holocaust deniers?

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jersey_City_shooting

Every day? No. But when it's 2021 and you gotta worry about getting gunned down for being a Jew?

Putin loves to use anti-Semitic rhetoric when convenient. Which is the big part of this...the stand pat and do nothing approach doesn't work when the resources of nation states can (logically) and have been behind harnessing disinformation.

The Jewish issue isn't the only issue, better examples might be the Christchurch shooting where the gunman was livestreaming on and because of 4chan.

If you get a chance check out HBO's doc about Jim Watkins and Q.

Christchurch shooting is a good example, because the follow-up crackdown on associated content showed just how far this can go. Remember his "manifesto"? In NZ, its distribution was banned outright by law (or rather government order, but they have laws on the books that allow for it). Not so in Australia - they couldn't find any legal means to restrict it, so the government basically informally asked the ISPs to "do something".

And they did - to the point where a bunch of websites with forums were blocked outright because of their hands-off policy wrt comments (usually in some particular subforum; it's a fairly common way to keep it civil elsewhere) meant that there were a bunch of posts with links to the document.

The end result is that a bunch of completely unrelated stuff was blocked in Australia outright for a while, by private companies in charge of communications acting in unison - effectively, a censorship cartel - with no political or judicial recourse, since the government was not involved in it, and the ISPs were in their right, legally speaking.

Ironically, someone (6f8986c3) replied to this claiming to be Jewish and sharing his experiences...and his post was flagged and removed... In a thread about censorship.

He didn't do it productively, he made it into a rant about political parties; you can't get useful discussion on such a loaded topic like that.

That's another part of this...you can't just say whatever you want and expect there not to be consequences.

It was no more of a rant than yours. But you disagree so you downvote and flag.

See?

I don't understand how one can say "it's not good enough" without proposing options that are actually better. I've yet to see any; all the censorship proposals on the table are far worse than the present state of affairs.

What, we aren't allowed to talk about issues if we haven't already solved them? Surely you can see how ridiculous that sounds. Ironically, you're also saying "these proposals aren't good enough" without proposing options that are actually better.

Of course we're allowed to talk about them; it's just that "it's not good enough" isn't helpful.

The option that is actually better than all the proposals on the table is what we have right now. I'm not claiming it's perfect, or even good - merely better.

> improve education around critical thinking,

Aye. This would improve so many things. Critical thinking is, in fact, not an instinctual ability. It's perfectly okay to talk mathematics illiteracy, but propaganda literacy? "No, no, we can't imply that people aren't capable of thinking for themselves." We have multiple historical instances of extremely successful disinformation campaigns, and people fell for it en-masse.

These "let people decide" trolls are effectively correlating critical thinking skills with intelligence, and it's patently absurd. Philosophers, some of the greatest thinkers there are/were, have spent years of their lives pondering the art of critical thinking.

Educating people with better critical thinkings skills is great. Deciding that educating people is too hard and that we need to allow large monopilistic platforms to decide what can be said with zero liability is much less good.

Mandating data interoperability between platforms seems like a good middle ground that allows diversity of moderation while reducing the monopoloatic power of large platforms.

> I make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest

I would say you did:

> And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive.

You asked the right question (who are you to determine the truth?) but then you didn't answer it. You continued on to imply that, in fact, you are in a position to sort out what's true unlike those other, inferior people who fall for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

> Or we can ditch bland cliches and false dichotomies and look at pragmatic steps that can be taken to, for instance, improve access to good information, improve education around critical thinking, and perhaps (as mentioned in other comments) re-examine things like automated algorithms that feed people ever more extreme content because it increases engagement levels, clicks and ad revenue.

"Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship. As far as I'm concerned, all of these "problems" are not problems, they're justifications for controlling other people and expressions of impotent rage at the failure to control those people. I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated or voted for the other guy. Part of freedom is the freedom to be wrong.

I think these are not new problems. Democracy, pluralism, free speech, trial by jury, etc are our solutions to these problems. They aren't particularly satisfying solutions because, as you said in your first post, the truth doesn't always win. Rather they're tragic compromises. But I don't see any serious suggestions about how we should improve them.

> You continued on to imply that, in fact, you are in a position to sort out what's true unlike those other, inferior people who fall for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

You missed that I was drawing a distinction between what is commonly thought of as the market place of ideas - in which rational discourse and honest debate enables people to learn, compare, agree and disagree, find greater truths, learn, etc etc - and the spread of misinformation based on falsehood, often perpetuated for profit.

We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate. We can debate until the cows come home about what it means, whether any opinions should be drawn or any action taken, but motivated lies are just not on the same footing as factual information.

> "Improving access to good information" is usually a euphemism for some kind of censorship.

You assume bad faith here, again. I think there’s a lot can be done by way of giving access to scientific information in accessible ways.

> I'm vaccinated and I voted for Biden but I do not understand why peope care that others decide not to get vaccinated

Well firstly Because that decision affects more than just those individuals, and puts others (including the already vaccinated and those who cannot be vaccinated) at risk. And secondly because some of those making the decision not to vaccinate, and putting themselves at risk, have done so armed with bad information.

The nature of the problems may not be new, but the scale and severity seem to be.

> with actual vaccine science

Who decides what that is? Plenty of actual scientists publish papers in actual science journals that conflict with each other and with official public health advice. The whole vaccines cause autism idea came from what looked like actual vaccine science.

Knowledge isn't actually that sure. Sometimes the authorities are wrong. Remember when bread was at the bottom of the food pyramid?

> but the scale and severity seem to be.

Seem to be or actually are? Are you using "facts" or media sensationalization to form your opinion?

So there’s no way at all, to your mind, to distinguish millions of shitposts about “The covid vaccine causes infertility, and contains 5G chips” from, for instance, genuine risk information?

We truly are swimming in a world in which nothing is true. Or you are anyway.

I can make up my own mind for my personal opinion but I don't want other people's ideas to be censored. Even if they're factually wrong, it's still OK to share them, I think.

> The covid vaccine causes infertility

The bizarre thing with this hoax, is that it looks like the mRNA vaccine increases swimmer motility.[1] Vaccinated folks should have no issues having babies if, for example, they need to improve their 5G reception at home.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2781360

You take an extreme example (5G chips in vaccines) to support the idea that we can draw a line in the sand and say what's true & what's false. But if you take an example closer to the line, things start to become less clear. Are masks useful to the general public? If you said "yes" a year ago, you would've been censored for spreading misinformation. If you said "no" yesterday, you would've been censored for spreading misinformation.

Anyway, if you think it's so easy to do a good job censoring information, why don't you point to a single example where that worked out? Just one is sufficient. It's okay, I'll wait.

You take a moderate example to support the idea that we cannot nevertheless have a threshold where we can be sure that something is false. But while we cannot clearly say where the land ends and the ocean begins, there are large swaths of places that we can positively identify as ocean.

The OP never claimed to have an appropriate solution so I don't know what you are talking about regarding them thinking censorship is easy.

Here's a claim that's definitely in the ocean - Mohammed is the messenger of God. Do you want that claim banned from the internet because it's clearly false (God doesn't even exist)? Do you want to exterminate Islamic faith?

Just because it's wrong, doesn't mean nobody should believe it or be exposed to it.

That particular statement is in fact neither known to be true nor false for some definitions of the Muslim God, since there is no secular evidence for the existence nor non-existence of God for those definitions of the Muslim God.

But I agree with the point you are trying to make, that many people have false beliefs crucial to a societal institutions that cannot realistically be suppressed by heavy-handed censorship without also destroying meaning and satisfaction for many people, and also the society itself. And of course, holy texts often contradict themselves, yet some consider all of it true.

However, you are arguing against a strawman, since OP never claimed to have a solution, nor even that censorship was the appropriate response, not do I claim that either.

> However, you are arguing against a strawman, since OP never claimed to have a solution, nor even that censorship was the appropriate response, not do I claim that either.

OP strongly implied that it's easy to distinguish which claims should be censored and which claims should not be censored. This is complete fantasy.

They didn't claim anything that strong. They claimed that some COVID misinformation is easily identifiable as false. They were silent on many other statements, whereas you think they said that all statements are easily distinguishable as true or false. Indeed, it's complete fantasy, but you're arguing against a strawman.

> The OP never claimed to have an appropriate solution so I don't know what you are talking about regarding them thinking censorship is easy.

Disagree. This is what OP said, among other things: "We absolutely can, as a society, say that (for example) misinformation about vaccines, where we are dealing with matters of fact, is not on a level with actual vaccine science. This is not really up for honest debate."

You are confusing the identification of certain statements as false (which is easy for some things), with the enforcement of censorship (which OP does not claim to have).

Ok. Allow me to rephrase: can you point to a single example where an entity was given power to decide which statements are false (for censorship-related purposes) and subsequently did a good job? To be specific, I mean doing a good job of identifying which statements are false and which statements are true.

Well, that's not something the OP has a good answer to, and they admit it. In fact, they've written,

> Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.

> make no claims to be one of the group of enlightened ubermensch who should be able to decide for the rest. Neither do I argue that such people exist or are necessary.

Gullible people exist. I mean, it's such a well-known phenomenon that the term "gullible" exists to describe people who fall for what should be obviously false information and lies. We all have our instances of gullibility, and we all have domains that we know nothing about, and there are countless people who prey on people with lack of knowledge in some area.

If people go around in real life deceiving people, someone might step in and tell them to watch out for the scam. There'll be signs in tourist areas where scammers frequent. Banks will send out notices on how to help their customers avoid financial traps. Schools teach kids to look out for bad information and misleading conclusions. Signs are posted in parks warning people not to venture out to certain areas because they're likely unprepared and could die (and people still die anyways).

This is all generally accepted as good.

But flag a post on some social networking site with a "This might be fake. Be careful", and people go wild saying the elite are trying to police us and they're destroying our freedoms.

Flagging a potential scam or potentially self-serving misinformation is not censorship and is very different from blocking content and banning posters.

The term "elf" exists to describe a kind (well, a few kinds) of supernatural vaguely-humanoid being. This is not generally considered evidence for the existence of elfs.

Exactly. Only a gullible person would think so.

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

This is a false dichotomy and a rather romantic notion. Independent adults rarely, if ever, make their minds from first principles. They do already cluster around people who think/convince others that they know better. So few of what we’re talking here is original thought, we are mostly riffing on what we’ve read elsewhere. And that’s OK. That how distributed cognition saves us a lot of time, when working correctly.

But distributed cognition of independent adults get to super irrational conclusions too, I don’t need to list past atrocities based on ridiculous ideas.

So while the failures and wins of distributed cognition is yet to be understood properly, it alone is not the culprit nor can be corrected via the virtues of atomized individualized cognition.

One thing is clear, ideas distributed over ad fueled companies’ screen estates conform to a particular topology and a particular objective function. The normativity of engagement is not that of reality. And the irrationality of those systems effect us even from afar, permeates into our culture and even into non-ad based forums like this.

I find this idea abhorrent as well, but I’m curious if you find it abhorrent because you think the claim is false and/or unsubstantiated, or if you find it abhorrent because even if it’s true it ought to be rejected due to some moral principle.

(not parent) I think it is pretty easy to substantiate it (some people are actually deficient), but hard to substantiate to the degree that would justify the measures people propose. Yes, you can find a few nutjobs, but do they justify these truth-seeking policies for the general population? What suggests that these policies are even beneficial?

But even if it was shown to be beneficial, I would still be against it on moral grounds I suppose (but I'm not sure since that might depend on how "beneficial" it is).

I've not really thought about it this way, but I believe both statements. Nobody should be a slave to how someone else wants them to behave, because people are autonomous beings with their own capacity and right to make their own decisions, and there is no universal law about how we should decide or prioritize things. I believe of course in many of the societal constructs we have (most of the ten commandments e.g., taxes) but I think there has to be an almost impossibility high bar in any new imposition we make on peoples right to have their own priorities, because we're all equal in the universe.

Maybe a weird answer, I'm not a philosopher, I just don't think there is a scale of rights that people have, or in the idea of an elite that has special decision making power because it is enlightened.

The best statements of this problem are in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public by Lippmann. You don't need to share his answers to those questions (which are an enlightened corporatism/fascism), to realize that to be serious about governance, answering them is a prerequisite.

This is the basic hierarchical nature of any complex society. In a well functioning society those people, called elites (today already considered a derogatory term), are being funneled to the top where they're put into positions of power.

I don't really know why that's in itself supposed to be abhorrent, because it's how any functional organisation is structured. The problems start when institutions break down and the quality of your elites is reduced, but the solution is not some sort of choose your own adventure story where you let the inmates run the asylum. There's no organisation on earth that survives like that.

The entire notion that the vast majority of adults 'make their own choices' is a complete fiction to begin with. Choices exist downstream from culture and culture itself is produced by elites and consumed by 'adults', and so the choice you have to ponder is which people you want to be in charge of producing your culture. Might be Harvard, Zuckerberg, Tucker, or the Pope, but the people have nothing to do with it.

This assumes that people reach "elite" status due to merit rather than to to complicated in-group favoring dynamics that serve to entrench certain class/ethnic/political interests. The more gatekeeping you allow the elites to do, the less meritocratic the elites are.

So the idea that some people are better at some things than other people is indeed true, but the idea that we can reliably measure that without the metric being gamed and corrupted is false.

> Choices exist downstream from culture and culture itself is produced by elites

You have it backwards. People who produce or shape culture become elites, it's not that people who are already elites are the only ones producing culture (or rather, influencing it). That has very different implications from what you're describing.

In fact, elites who intentionally try to shape culture often get laughed at (cue the "Imagine" video).

The elites at any given time are actively promoting this premise. But, seeing how elites get wiped out and replaced now and then, and society keeps going on, I think this "basic hierarchical nature" very much ought to be questioned by anyone who does not fancy becoming part of the current or future elite themselves.

It's not ironic, and not surprising. HN is very willing to "censor" (i.e. moderate, ban, etc) and on top of that, "politics" is considered off-topic altogether according to the guidelines.

In such an environment, the better ideas often do rise up to the top. Twitter and Facebook are not such environments.

"We" shield ourselves from bad ideas because this forum would be overrun if we didn't.

> we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice

One of the problems is that we don't all get the same information.

> or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.

You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

> Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

Instead of making a snarky smear upon the faculty of what is probably the most coveted university in the world, why don't you just come out and make an informed argument on what you find so wrong with them?

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Issac Asimov

As an immigrant to America, I have thought hard about the differences between it and the developing country I came from. We don’t have any shortage of intellectuals, and those Harvard professors export their ideas for the whole world. Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations. I’m convinced that what we’re missing is ordinary Americans.

> Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations.

It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations.

It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And their creation (the Internet) led to historic amounts of wealth creation in a stupendously short amount of time.

I also wonder where Britain would be without the numerous professors at elite colleges whose research in physics, mathematics, and chemistry made the Industrial Revolution possible.

We’re talking about who to put in charge. The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything.

There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

This is not a knock on academic elites in general. I want them sitting around and building the Internet! But I want a farmer actually running the country.

> The US was built with basically just a few kinds of people in charge: farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers. It was already wealthy before there were any Ivy League professors doing anything.

The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldiering. What things were like 200+ years ago has no bearing on how they should be today.

> Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.

One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building? Marx wasn't even in charge of any of those countries. Other people (such as Lenin, a lawyer, and Trotsky, born to a farmer) read his work, went "this shit sounds dope", and tragedy ensued.

I can point you to any number of countries run by "farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers" that weren't as successful as the US. As I already mentioned, Lenin was a lawyer. So was Fidel Castro. I hope I don't need to go through a list various military dictators.

> But I want a farmer actually running the country.

I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country. You can find people like that in every field. I couldn't care less what their background is.

The US succeeded (in part) because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity. George Washington stepped down voluntarily from the presidency after two terms. It seems normal to us but it was unthinkable back then. Everyone just assumed he'd stay in charge until he died.

> One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building?

No, that’s just the most egregious example. Circling back to my original point: I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes countries rich and how do you turn poor countries into rich ones. Academicians spend tons of time studying psychology, culture, politics can etc. But I can’t think of any of those theories that has ever been implemented in the real world to help a poor society develop into a rich one. When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.

> I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country.

No. Ideas don’t make countries successful. Integrity, yes, but academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard. And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.

> I couldn't care less what their background is. The US succeeded because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity.

The US succeeded because they were English by culture and departed little from the Anglo system of government and society, which was not created but evolved organically over centuries.

Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.” It ended in disaster and bloodshed.

> When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.

He (and most national leaders, elected or otherwise) works at too high a level to talk about academic theories in general conversation. You don't think he and the people working in his government studied economics, history, and politics? They just made Singapore prosperous by getting everyone to work harder and study more?

> academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard

Neither do "farmers".

> And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.

That's just broad stereotyping. We can do that for any of the professions you think should be in charge. "Military officers are rigid, hawkish, and overly inclined to action". "Businessmen are short-sighted and focus on the bottom line above all" and so on.

> Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.”

Not really.

> He (and most national leaders, elected or otherwise) works at too high a level to talk about academic theories in general conversation. You don't think he and the people working in his government studied economics, history, and politics? They just made Singapore prosperous by getting everyone to work harder and study more?

There is a difference between people with judgment governing with the advice of academics, and putting academic theories directly into action. A good example during pandemic were governors who listened to doctors but applied their own judgment after listening to other stakeholders, and those who outsourced decision making to credentialed experts.

The amount of goalpost moving in this comment thread left me quite dizzy.

We went from "academics can't build nations" to "academics can't lead nations". Then to "America became great because farmers, lawyers, and soldiers were in charge" (while ignoring failed nations that also had farmers, lawyers, and soldiers in charge). Finally landing upon Lee Kuan Yew and national character building (no idea how that's related).

There were no actual examples of an academic taking charge of a country and that country failing due to them being an academic (vs just being corrupt, despotic, insane, or plain incompetent). On the other hand, I provided lots of examples that showed academics have made modern society and the economy possible.

I'd argue that most academics don't have any interest in politics or leadership, which causes them to be relatively underrepresented in the arena. Regardless, I'm not biased against people due to their profession, as you appear to be.

>Professors at elite colleges have created exactly zero prosperous nations.

You mean all by themselves? Well neither have plumbers, but I'm not about to disparage them over it, either.

Are you really asking for an informed argument about what's so wrong with the rule of the Ivy League optimates? Isn't it pretty simple just to cite Robert McNamara and call it a day? What am I missing about the complexity of this issue?

They are >90% very left leaning, which is common in elite academic institutes, but such groups are typically contemptuous of average Americans and their religious views.

This would set up a likely conflict, such as what we got a hint of when the masses elected Trump as a big middle finger.

Why is it that the politics of academics is found to be so distasteful, when we accept the politics of businessmen such as Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch as a matter of course? In a country that had always worshiped technological innovation, why are academics who provide the very seeds of this innovation, disrespected so easily?

Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. It got us an egomaniacal dotard, drunk on power, who shifted his politics when the opportunism suited him. His TV show got him just enough notoriety to move the needle among the masses. When he found that his toxic personality, based on name-calling and blustery bufoonery found a reception from Right-wing voters, there was nothing that could stop him from winning their side. But this was a man who could work with no one who wasn't willing to serve him without question, be they judges or legislators, and certainly a deal-breaker for our allies.

His world-view was an American centric one entirely, at a time when China had earned and demanded a role he couldn't conceive of or negotiate. Behind the scenes, he ruled a chaotic White House that was fortunately tested little. Still, the stories that escaped from this White House show that he was not to be contained by any legal constraints, and that he fostered an atmosphere where staff worked at cross-purposes to one another. Their singular focus was on the media, yet they couldn't even manage this successfully, despite the allegiance and sycophancy from Fox.

Finally, COVID-19 was the test they would not pass. Although Trump was due to receive some sympathy from his two impeachments, once America saw the reckless way he managed this pandemic and the huge toll it bore on us, there was little chance he could win the 2020 election. What we saw after the election was an unheard of nothing-to-lose strategy of trying to steal the election by any falsehood necessary, whether within the courts or in the streets. The books are coming out on the market now, but they show that our wildest dreams of what could have been happening in that White House paled when compared to horrid reality of what did.

We likely have to thank a mere few individuals such as Gen. Mark Milley, Mike Pence and such for holding together our country in the moments when it was the most vulnerable to those whose only concern was for power.

“ Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. “

Your??

First, lumping engineers in with the bulk of academia is disingenuous to say the least.

Second, what does it say about the desirability of what’s being sold by the technocratic elite that half the country voted for a second term for the egomaniacal dotard (for he surely was that), and most of the other half of the country got behind Joe Biden, a man from a working class background, a graduate of a second tier university known for his popular appeal rather than his intelligence?

The “politics of academics is distasteful” because they too often lack any basis in the lived experience of real people.

You point to Trump, but I’d note that not even Democrats like the academic social engineers. On Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren (a Harvard professor) had an embarrassing performance. Even in NYC, home of the country’s technocratic elite, voters passed over the technocrat in favor of someone who promised to carry a gun to church as mayor.

If you deplore the left-wing politics of academics because (perhaps) they live in an impractical, protected world, do you also deplore the right-wing politics of the clergy -- who also certainly live in a protected, isolated world? And what experience do the clergy have in the lived experience of 'real' people?

American clergy are a whole lot more diverse in their ideology than academics. Mainline Protestant clergy are often extremely progressive. Islam has a strong socialist streak, etc. They are also typically a whole lot more experienced than academics with people’s real lives and the problems of real communities.

Regardless, nobody is advocating having clergy run the country. (And no, listening to clergy as stakeholders in society and responding to voters’ whose beliefs might be rooted in religion is not the same thing as what the left seeks to do with academics. Putting a clerical “czar” in place to “nudge” people to desirable behaviors would be wild even for the Bush administration.)

That's called "sortition" [1], but currently not part of our democratic process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

> You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing is strong controls on the power they wield, to that "short sighted masses" cannot take over. This idea underpins liberal democracy.

Yes, but the tricky part here is that "those in power" is far more than just those in government. As this very thread topic itself demonstrates, there are plenty of people and organizations that are not the government that have a large amount of power.

In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.

My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.

This is a very good point (it's my view that government has abdicated a lot of the power it did have in recent years and tech has filled the void, but that's another story). When I say "those in power", I mean the broad interpretation, not just government.

I agree that we need norms that limit any concentration of power. We've had anti-monopoly laws on the books for 130 years that serve a valid purpose. We may need to look at more laws to deal with recent constructs, I.e. platforms. I can see a superficial contradiction between not wanting government power, and giving government the power to break up monopolies or platforms. But if the overall goal is a restriction on how power can be concentrated, it's still in keeping with the idea of limiting what "those in power" can do.

I'm sure I've missed something. I definitely take your point.

Yes and this is why individual freedoms and local decision making should take precedence over collectivist thought, tyrannies of the majority, and top-down decisions.

The ignorant, short-sighted mass. That answer is kind of in the kernel of our civics. You're not supposed to have to think before answering that question. :)

(I mean those first two sentences non-ironically.)

> Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?

An elite in practice means that we're stuck with irrational beliefs such as Lysenkoism. Democracy allows beliefs to compete and often correct ideas win. It's far from perfect but still has a better track record than self-styled rational elites.

The following quote is from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

> But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

"The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc)."

I couldn't agree more. While no-one can deny that we are all born with different capacities (intellectual or otherwise), the argument that some people are essentially incapable of taking care of their own lives is a very slippery slope and a cynical one at that, viewing humans as incapable of learning or improving. I find it truly repulsive.

IMO your stance basically amounts to "propaganda doesn't work". History would suggest otherwise.

Of course propaganda works. So use it to convince people of the truth instead of just muzzling them.

This post is pretty off-topic and unresponsive.

A central premise of Doctorow's argument is the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor. Proceeding from that framing, he proposes that the ACCESS Act as an important middle ground that could, among other things, help stave off the death of Section 230. OP points out that our better angels don't always win in that marketplace.

Let's get less abstract. The article envisions a market-based approach toward online censorship. The idea that a "marketplace of filters" would create a "live and let live" scenario seems extraordinarily naive to me. It seems much more likely that making it easier to choose filter bubbles -- and introducing a profit motive into the construction of such filters -- would just escalate the appetite to censor, on both sides.

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us

You seem to be confusing critique with a proposal of some alternative. Just because OP believes that the "marketplace of ideas" thesis is a farce and that the ACCESS Act is probably a non-solution to the wrong problem, doesn't mean OP wants to censor people.

It's possible to both believe that Doctorow's argument is wrong and also not be a full-throated supporter of aggressive censorship.

In fact...

> The most abhorrent idea...

You take rather flagrant liberties when interpreting parent's post, constructing an unrecognizable strawman out of a post that contains phrases like "Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not." and "And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody".

> The strawman of...

Those in glass houses...

> The most abhorrent idea of all to me is that there are stupid, weak people that are worse than "us" that we need to shield from bad ideas because they are not smart enough (like we are) to handle them. Lots of support for this view in downstream comments (we're just intelligent apes etc).

What you just described is called a representative democracy and was essentially created because a direct democracy didn't work, for exactly those reasons you mention (many people can't actually think for themselves - at the political level).

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice

You're completely ignoring the crux here - it's about both access to information and algorithms that present signals vs noise. Pretending that my 95 year old grandma can reliably decide that a fox news segment isn't sensationalized drivel after being primed for 30+ years that its "news" and not entertainment, is just as silly as you thinking this whole suggestion is ridiculous.

The approach of “people are gullible and need someone smarter to show them the truth” of course requires some “smart enough” and no doubt many HNers consider themselves those people. Which is a hilarious take on HN if you ever read a discussion on health matters.

The amount of bad information, random conjuncture and conspiratorial thinking is pretty shocking.

I did not interpret their comment that way. I see part of the problem being that the spaces we hang out in now are not conducive to productive conversation with a variety of people and instead nurture division due to perverse incentives and poor design.

Why is it ridiculous? You don’t respect the potential injustice which can occur due to disparity in information and/or knowledge. Think about the popularity of crypto. How can you think your position of complete lack of regulation is moral? You think it’s okay to allow the targeting of the economically vulnerable to continue without restrictions via ads or - my favorite - celebrity endorsements?

This is ridiculous.

It's not clear to me that censorship isn't making it worse. You have a mass populist/anti-elitist movement in the country. You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses?

What exactly is the end-game here? You're not going to beat (or educate) the populism and conspiracy theories out of Americans. We're talking about a country where a prominent tech billionaire died because he disregarded "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet to treat his pancreatic cancer.[1] That river is wide and deep, my friend. Telling people that the elites are controlling information sharing online for their own good is unlikely to have the desired result.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

> You're telling me that a solution to this is to have elites at multi-national mega-corporations deciding what information should reach the unwashed masses?

No, I’m specifically not telling you that! I’m not sure I have any good solutions but I specifically called out that censorship probably wasn’t the best plan!

I just wanted to say that the concept of a marketplace of ideas, as commonly envisaged in terms of ideas with merit rising to prominence, seems to be naive, and when we’re building systems to facilitate an uncensored or uncensorable marketplace of ideas, perhaps we should keep that in mind.

"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%." (https://pancreatic.org/pancreatic-cancer/about-the-pancreas/...)

I would hesitate to say your prominent tech billionaire died because of diet choices.

He had a highly curable type of pancreatic cancer.

This is absolutely incorrect, he had islet cell neuroendocrine cancer, which is a much less common form of pancreatic cancer. "Highly curable pancreatic cancer" is a totally ludicrous statement.

The prognosis of these type of tumor is highly variable and he lived a pretty long time with it regardless.

He did not 'disregard "the medical elite" and went on an all-fruit diet', he had the tumor removed[0] nearly 20 years ago, and only after years of the most advanced medical treatments in private did he finally die. Steve Jobs lived for seven years after the tumor was removed, meaning he exceeded the 5-year survival rate.

Sadly, if somebody had stage 4 pancreatic cancer in the year 2011, the only cure for the disorder that will follow their untimely passing would be to soberly arrange ones affairs and express their humanity to everyone they have ever cared about.

[0] - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Apple-s-Jobs-has-cancero...

“The 5-year survival rate for people with pancreatic NET that has not spread to other parts of the body from where it started is 93%.”

Jobs delayed aggressive treatment for close to a year. He finally had the Whipple surgery, but it reoccurred likely due to spreading.

Well never know what might have been but suffice to say he only shortened his life.

The "highly curable" is relative to other types of cancer.

While Jobs did undergo surgery, he waited 9 months and didn't get surgery until after the cancer had spread. I don't see amy credible medical claims that this dis not have an impact on his survival.

> But Jobs refused surgery after diagnosis and for nine months after, favoring instead dietary treatments and other alternative methods...By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

This is at the very least a reasonable description of the actual events.

But even now that we have acknowledged "highly curable" to be relative to other types of cancer, pancreatic cancer being among the most sinister and deadly, I take great issue with the notion of highly curable pancreatic cancer.

  By the time Jobs finally opted for surgery, the cancer had spread. He had an under-the-radar liver transplant and began putting a lot of energy into researching the most sophisticated experimental methods, making a complete about-face from how he began his treatment years before.
  According to the New York Times, Jobs was one of the few people in the world to have his genome sequenced. Collaborating researchers at several institutions sequenced his DNA in order to develop a treatment that would target his specifically mutated cell pathways. He went for an experimental treatment in Switzerland in 2009, which involves using a radioactive isotope to attack the faulty hormone-producing cells of the body.[0]

This story is so much more about anger, denial, bargaining and the grieving process than it is about an (admittedly and certainly) aloof and incredibly powerful figure who was flagrant in the face of medical authority.

A previous romantic partner of mine's father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and made startlingly similar choices against the behest of his entire family and everyone he knew. He was surely not an aloof billionaire who ate nothing but fruit, he was a very pragmatic union carpenter who took great pains to manage his health.

I know you did not make a claim like this, but I personally don't find it at all unthinkable for a somebody to make this sort of choice when faced with this diagnosis.

[0] Same, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

Fair enough. A (probably weighted average) prior on his pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor puts the 5 year survival rate at 54% instead of 9%. [1] It appears there are more pancreatic NET cases in the least favorable, "distant" SEER classification.

Nevertheless, there can be more factors at play than distrust of the medical community. Some people may want to live out the rest of their lives free from the harsh side effects of chemotherapy, for example. I wouldn't use his cancer treatment decisions to argue that tech elites make bad choices in the face of information, to bring us back to the broader discussion.

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-neuroendocrine-tumo...

That's because the "marketplace of ideas" is being distorted by algorithms that are going to favor "provocative" ideas that drive clicks. Exciting lies defeat boring truths.

That tells you that "marketplace of ideas" is a dumb idea, because we already have proved a million times that people are not the rational creatures that we were sold we were for a long time. We are smart apes, but apes none the least: emotionally driven by our limbic system, very tribal and status seeking. Prone to rationalize all these basic impulses in a million different ways creating the illusion of rational individualism. The algorithms just shows us our true nature, don't make the mistake of shooting the messenger.

There is a marketplace of ideas. That's not anything that is ever going to change. Concepts spread and are accepted or they don't.

The question is only how. Is it going to be by dictate? Is a church or government or institution going to enforce which ideas spread, or is it going to be free, spreading at the level of the individual?

There is no moral alternative to the free exchange of ideas. The only alternative is a restricted exchange... censorship and punishment.

> or is it going to be free, spreading at the level of the individual?

And what are the consequences of that?

When people talk about the marketplace of ideas they tend to think of good, beneficial, ideas winning out over foolishness, conspiracy and just plain inaccuracy.

This has been shown up as naive lately. And if we really are talking about the "marketplace of ideas" being raw, Darwinian, strongest wins, then are we prepared to deal with the fallout of the fact that loud, motivated, well funded bullshit merchants will continue to have a huge grip over the public dialogue?

I feel you are possibly too cynical about the ability of people to (eventually) figure things out.

Because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean large numbers of people actually believe it.

There will always be "wrong" people. That will never change. But there is a degree of wisdom in crowds.

Proper education and "good" cultural values are extremely important and we haven't done so well instilling those lately.

Censorship has also turned out recently to be a bad idea. Neither solution is perfect but since censorship has the basis to destroy information we should choose the less dangerous path of “do nothing”. What is so dangerous lately that has you concerned?

Or that a few algorithms created by a few companies does not constitute anything remotely resembling a marketplace.

People can choose to get their information from places other than the large platforms. To me, the "marketplace" is the internet as a whole. If people choose to stay on the platform, is it not similar to choosing CNN and not ever looking at Fox? In the end, people have many options but choose to limit which options they engage with

There’s a section in the EFF on why not being on the large networks is a detriment.

The usual idea of a marketplace is preserving people's freedom to go to alternatives. Yes, sometimes that freedom has to be preserved via intervention to preserve choices (e.g. antitrust laws), but it's always weird to me to see the critique used as a reason for less freedom rather than more.

Also the shock "wrongthink" things we see on the internet might not be a representative sample of what the general public actually believes.

The marketplace of ideas works. It may not work in the timescale you want or with the tradeoffs you want while the truth settles out, but I think these claims that it doesn’t work are hasty.

Furthermore there isn’t a better alternative. Right now censorship from platform owners is abusively used to skew political discussions, using the pretense of factuality. I regularly see fact checkers make mistakes or make misleading claims or they inconsistent apply scrutiny. I see trusted organizations like old newspapers and health organizations (like the WHO) regularly make mistakes or sell their own speculation as incontrovertible truth. Trust cannot be given to a few lone entities. The marketplace of ideas doesn’t have this problem since it is decentralized.

If the algorithm distorts conversation, then how can you be sure it more accurately reflects human nature?

How does something that isn't a marketplace of ideas prove it's dumb? Or should this question be punished by your algorithm?

The main agenda the algorithm has is selecting stuff human nature has a high propensity to click on...

Kind of like drug cartels having the agenda of producing drugs that human nature has a high propensity to be drawn to?

In the face of hyperstimuli, we can't talk about mere human propensities as a justification, else we would have already turned ourselves into junkies many times over.

How many years did it take for heroin go from a cough medicine to a schedule I drug? Amphetamines, cigarettes etc.

There is a reason you can't put simply everything on the marketplace, and that is OK. That doesn't mean the idea of a marketplace is broken.

Alternatively, it simply makes it easier to click on the presented content than to purposely seek out other content. Front pages and headlines dominate media for a reason.

That's an assumption which critics of these algorithms would disagree with.

That may well be a big factor, and that's something that needs to be looked at more closely. Lots of people describe being drawn down the rabbithole by algorithmically driven suggestions which nudge them ever more extreme.

I have thought this for a while. Algorithms are something entirely new to human discourse.

Apparently I watched some alt-right-adjacent podcast or something, so for weeks youtube kept recommending seriously racist, fascist, white nationalist content. The algorithm was actively trying to lead me down the rabbit hole. Obviously it's learned that doing so increases engagement.

The lab-leak hypothesis is provocative (and probably true), but got smothered anyway. It was just inconsistent with the narrative.

You believe in the narrative?

There was quite a public display last election about news orgs agreeing to not cover Biden in negative light so as to not hurt his chances. What would you call this?

I don’t know, newspapers support one party or another. The narrative with emphasis makes you sound like a nutjob.

> I don’t know, newspapers support one party or another.

Yea that’s one, extremely light-footed, way to explain it. It doesn’t cover all left biased news sounding near identical though nor does it cover the dangers of group think mentality which we see manifesting now.

> The narrative with emphasis makes you sound like a nutjob.

That's a pretty petty thing to have issue wouldn't you say? But ok, dems now say using italics makes you a nut job, lets ban italics now.

Same could be said about right biased news, and this has always been like that (both sides of spectrum) since the invention of newspapers basically.

I'm not American, hell I can't even remember which of democrats/republicans are more or less conservative - or which animal logo is which.

What I'm saying is, that using the narrative makes you sound like a conspiracy nutjob that insinuates that there is some conspiracy going on.

> Same could be said about right biased news, and this has always been like that (both sides of spectrum) since the invention of newspapers basically.

How come dems always revert to whataboutism?

We’re not talking about biased news. We’re talking about concerted efforts by multiple groups of people to create a single unified voice for their party.

Also do you get that you can not be a dem and also not be a republican?

> What I'm saying is, that using the narrative makes you sound like a conspiracy nutjob that insinuates that there is some conspiracy going on.

Oh it’s no conspiracy, it’s a unified party fighting what they view as an enemy.

The nutjob thing is just stupid already. In fact you’re starting to sound like one for having such and issue with it.

This is clearly not whataboutism. I’m not gonna debate why, I leave that as either an exercise for you, or tale it as a trolling attempt.

> you can not be a dem and also not be a republican

False dilemma.

> Oh it’s no conspiracy, it’s a unified party fighting what they view as an enemy. The nutjob thing is just stupid already. In fact you’re starting to sound like one for having such and issue with it.

Sure sure

> This is clearly not whataboutism. I’m not gonna debate why, I leave that as either an exercise for you, or tale it as a trolling attempt.

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

I leave that as an exercise to you. This quite literally fits the definition.

Agree with the rest or not, lets see what happens in 2022! Dems keep digging a hole for themselves acting this way.

Also, speaking of trolling, remember you took issue with emphasis and still haven't disproven that the narrative doesn't exist. So this entire post chain is a troll attempt by yourself.

It didn’t get smothered though. Since the early days of the pandemic I haven’t seen any discussion of the pandemic of any appreciable length that doesn’t contain mentions of that hypothesis.

That's a case of the "marketplace of ideas" routing around the attempted suppression by the large media organizations and government. I don't think you would have read any mention of it (besides condemnation) from any of them, until the last few months.

Geez, I think that paragraph is completely true, but it sure sounds like conspiratorial nonsense. The state we're in...

It seems to me that it has been a popular meme since the start of the pandemic.

It seems unfair to deprecate algorithms which "favor 'provocative' ideas that drive clicks" as a `distortion` of the marketplace of ideas.

It seems more that by driving clicks, the algorithms are `facilitating` the marketplace. People are signaling the ideas they prefer, idea suppliers are producing more of such ideas, and the people get these ideas at ever-lower prices.

How is that in any way a distortion of an ideal marketplace?

There is no ideal marketplace of ideas.

It takes years to fully develop an understanding of any particular ideology. How are you supposed to judge which one is better at interpreting the world on such a short term system?

There is simply too much friction in the ideological marketplace for it to approximate even loosely an ideal market.

It's an ideal "twitch" marketplace, not an ideal "deep thought" marketplace. "The marketplace of ideas" wasn't usually considered to be about gossip, rumor, or entertainment. Those are... something, but not "the marketplace of ideas".

Provocative ideas are not the same as good ideas. These algorithms artificially promote provocative ideas because that drives revenue. That's a market distortion, just like subsidies distort economic markets.

I actually think algorithms are more likely to promote things that either reinforce your existing beliefs or incite outrage.

That is an idea extremely unlikely to be contested, given what we've known for a few years now.

I don't think there is a marketplace of ideas that can be separated from the algorithms used to promote them.

Every ordering of content is going to favour something, even chronological.

Somebody will find a way to abuse any sorting mechanism you use

Give the user the driving wheel of the recommendation or open up the algorithms. It's not that complicated.

Speaking of, I wish hn would hide upvote counts. If I wrote something provocative and stinging here against social media, it would be karma city, and it feels good to see your number go up. Thats not a temptation I like

That is no doubt true (about how the algorithms work). At the same time what we see is that there is a market, demand, for misinformation. And some people are making money from that.

Why is there so much misinformation about Covid vaccines and vaccines in general? Because people want to believe in such misinformation and because that allows websites to make money from their readership. Therefore the peddling of misinformation continues.

It is not so different from what publications like National Inquirer and Weekly World News have been doing for a long time. But instead of paying for National Inquirer you can now get such misinformation for free on the web, because you are paying for that by spending your time seeing the advertisements. Information wants to be "free" whatever that means, but people want misinformation, to give them the feeling they are right about their prejudices.

SEE: https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/disinformation-media-vaccine-...

Because there are sociopolitical actors who can extract direct benefit from OTHER people believing misinformation to their detriment. You are omitting this motivation, and it's a significant factor, worth spending money and energy on if your motivation is to harm a population that you see as your enemy.

This assumes a global marketplace of information propagation. That's the new factor here: the actual motivation isn't all that new.

I wonder how prevalent the will to "harm a population" is. I think it's more about benefitting oneself financially than trying to harm others. Politically speaking yes politicians try to harm (the popularity of) their opponents. But politicians are a very small slice of the population.

> Weekly World News

This has always been obvious satire.

Yeah, well the Chupacabra still keeps me up at night.

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created

I don't think this is unique to the online world. It's just how humans are. We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.

> We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.

While I agree, I think there's more to it than that, I think it's more serious than that, and I think the message amplification capabilities afforded to profit-driven (or ideologically driven) bad actors is something we've not really seen before. Certainly not at this scale.

So while it is human nature, that's not to say the outcomes are desirable, nor that the marketplace of ideas concept is consistent with reality. In fact I think it might be the point, much like the perfect economic market, the concept of the well-functioning marketplace of ideas cannot exist, because of the humans that make it up.

"major platforms’ amplification features have also caused or contributed to real damage in the world. At a societal level, they have spread misleading political material, to the detriment of democratic governance"

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/amplification-and-its-dis...

The Catholic Church felt the same way about Gutenberg's press.

Gutenberg's first mass-produced book was a Latin Vulgate bible. The 40 remaining copies are among the most valuable books in the world. Gutenberg also printed indulgences for the church. It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07090a.htm

>It's fair to say the Catholic Church absolutely loved Gutenberg.

I wasn't talking about the man, I was talking about the machine. The Catholic Church certainly didn't love it anymore once The Reformation happened. See the Catholic Church could no longer control information when lay people could read the Bible, and Martin Luther's texts. Gutenberg's press completely transformed the church's control in Europe and it lasts to this day.

https://speccoll.library.arizona.edu/online-exhibits/exhibit...

This has parallels today. The government can no longer control information via traditional media channels because the internet, in its current form, exists. They want that control back. I believe this is an attempt to regain control. The government would never shut down big tech companies, they are a great source of information for data collection.

I knew you were going to bring up the Reformation. The printing press, by that point, was something anyone with sufficient resources could obtain. The Catholic Church was certainly not lacking for resources. Martin Luther and his allies didn't have access to non-traditional media channels. Everyone was using printing presses, the Catholic Church just wanted to have the last word on who was allowed to use printing presses.

Interestingly, in 1644 John Milton wrote an impassioned philosophical defense of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. He wrote it response to the requirement, of the Protestant government, that all authors be licensed and approved by the state. In that defense, he wrote, "Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate"

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm

>Catholic Church just wanted to have the last word on who was allowed to use printing presses.

Which is the way government is treating big tech, government wants the last word on "truth." Sounds like you are agreeing with my analogy.

I agree that the outcomes are not desirable. Many people over history have recognized this, and that is why we have religions that recognize our inherent flawed or "sinful" nature in this regard and give us a framework of rules for how to live. Look at the "Seven Deadly Sins" just as one example, it's pretty much what the social media algorithms select for when they promote content.

It is not unique to the online world, but the online world does change the dynamics around these things significantly, because the social immune system that we have in the real world completely fails on the internet.

In a small, real world friend group "that guy" who talks about ancient aliens, flat earth and Pleiadians or whatever gets shut down real quick and suffers consequences within his social circle.

In the online world, "those guys" can find each other and egg each other on into more bizarre world views. This isn't a theory, you can watch this happen in real time with the qanon "movement".

People who (rightfully) feel estranged by mainstream media or left behind by politics pick up some weird idea, find communities who agree with them and end up holding on to those views longer than they would without the support. In some cases, this leads them to slowly becoming more estranged from real world contacts. Family and friends distance themselves because they don't want to hear any more about how Earth being a globe is somehow a big conspiracy and this little supportive online community eventually remains the only safe space to talk openly and they become more invested in it.

The problem is these communities harshly punish everyone who disagrees with the mob. Increasingly outlandish ideas are pushed into the conversation, and your only options are to agree or to be turned away, which becomes increasingly painful the more other contacts withdraw from you. It's a death spiral that is scary effective.

Eventually the only people that you can relate with is a group that also talks about how every bad thing that happens is orchestrated, democrats are all traitors that need to be put in front of a firing squad and baking soda treats cancer.

We need to come up with something to fight this deterioration of the social fabric, but I agree censorship is not sufficient or maybe even helpful.

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument.

This is plausible, so people believe it. Fortunately, it is false. Compare the state of the world regarding germ theory, human rights, smoking, racism, education, the belief in violence to solve problems, or the delusion that is theism to the world 100 years ago.

It used to be way, way worse. The better ideas are winning.

Things are improving tremendously. It just takes time.

But are those ideas winning because people are rationally chosing to believe in them in the marketplace of ideas, or just that we grew up with them and the people with contrary beliefs are dying out.

There is a saying that "science advances one funeral at a time" because even professors etc., one of the most rational group of people on the planet I would think, have biases against new theories despite evidence supporting them, instead sticking to what they already know even if it would be disproven.

Those are all pre-internet. Not sure they are good examples of how the marketplace works in social media.

"Often at the root of these is a profit motive."

Big Tech is DOA if the web is not open for commercial use, i.e., advertising. But the web is definitely not DOA if all advertising ceased. Look at the enormous growth of the internet, the vast number of users with internet subscriptions today, billions of them using the network on a daily basis for a variety of non-commerial uses, hundreds of millions uploading content for others to consume. (Big Tech middlemen pervert this recreational usage for their own commercial uses.)

The internet was not created for the purposes of advertising. (There was none in the beginning.) That is only one use. Look what happens when we allow ads without any rules. Yikes.

Even if advertising were regulated, the web could still be used for commerce, e.g., processing commercial transactions.

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas

There are indeed some factual mistakes floating around, mostly around covid-is-just-a-flu and the-earth-is-flat discussions.

But usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.

Alas, there's no hard science in most of these issues. There is a bunch of plausible-looking speculations, philosophical theses and general thoughts. Pretty much like 17-th century physics, in 18-th century biology or 19-th century medicine were.

As for the ideas being harmful... What do we do with potentially harmful, yet factually correct statements, and does the same logic apply to beneficial, but factually wrong ones?

I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one.

But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit.

> usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.

flat earth is .... well I wouldn't put it with the most harmful ideas. It's clearly very silly, and not a great thing to propagate, but so far flat earthers haven't taken their beliefs out on the road, so to speak. Antivax, now that's harmful. There are certainly all sorts of grey areas and I wouldn't want to suppress discussion of safety, of risks from emergency approval or whatever, but when you get to "The vaccine makes you infertile" and "The vaccine will kill everyone that gets it" and "The vaccine contains 5G chips that they are going to use to track you", and such views actually start to impact the uptake...

> and such views actually start to impact the uptake

I’m not sure that’s how the chain of causality works. We have 80s-style public health communication that isn’t effective today. People are looking for a reason to reject it. If not the 5G chip stuff, it’d be something else.

I think this just reinforces that the marketplace of ideas is a bust... personally. Because again, people aren't looking to evaluate rationally.

People are turned off by appeals to authority logical fallacies.

Trying to make them the only acceptable source of information is never going to sell.

I'm afraid that people are also turned off by facts that go against their preconceived notions, and people are predisposed to accept, with little question, authorities with whom they already identify.

In fact I'd go as far as saying your argument there is a logical fallacy, as I'm making no claim people should accept appeals to authority.

I don't think antivax conspiracy makes a lot of impact.

Current vaccination rate in the US is 55%.

This is comparable with the number of people who, for example, do a dental check-up at least once a year, which is 60%, although there's no dentists conspiracy theory, at least not such a popular one.

P.S. those downvoting, please feel free to, but I would highly appreciate a couple of lines on what's wrong with the message? Pure curiosity.

The difference is dentists in the US cost money (unless you have a job with dental insurance which many low-end jobs do not). People who don't go to dentists regularly probably can't afford it. The Covid-19 shot is free (at least in the US).

Agreed. I doubt that half the population thinks that the COVID vaccine is a conspiracy to kill them, render them infertile, or depopulate the earth.

I'm not vaccinated, and I don't believe those things. I do see the dentist every 6 months though.

Tribal politics is probably a better predictor than fringe theories.

I have a friend who's gone off the deep end in the past year (like so many others).

He freely admits that he doesn't believe the vaccine is bad, and might even be good. His sole reason for not taking it is, and I quote, "because they want me to." In other words, simple spite.

We're not talking about a teenager here, but a successful man in his 60's who is probably the single most well-read person I know.

You see no value in the instinct to resist conformity? All major social and scientific progress has been made by someone with that kind of mindset.

You could argue that it's misplaced in this case, but that's already a more charitable interpretation of anti-conformists that will serve you better than just saying they've "gone off the deep end".

For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater. Anti-vax misinformation during a pandemic is definitely in the same vein as yelling fire in a theater.

There are a few solutions. Don’t know that any of these are possible, but sometimes solutions only get found in a listing of possible solutions.

Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face.

Or massive platforms could find a way to be less massive. Ie “we’re just not going to host governmental agencies or politicians.” Also bracketing the scope of posts and information on social media.

Or who knows.

Edit-one observation I’ve had is the internet is best when tied with another source of truth. Ie you can generally try recipes from a website and tell whether it makes palatable food by just making and tasting it.

>For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater.

This meme persists, because it sounds nice, but the phrase is from a Supreme Court case where they ruled you can't distribute anti-WWI-draft flyers. Not exactly the precedent to be invoked, here. It was overturned (in part) to define that criminal speech under the first amendment is only speech that is determined to incite imminent lawless activity.

>Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face.

Which is why banning "misinformation" is a terrible idea.

In a well-run theater yelling fire should lead to a prompt and orderly evacuation.

It's called fire drill.

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top.

This has been well known for a couple thousand years at least. Aristotle comprehensively covered it in his Rhetoric[1]. There have always been people who can only be persuaded by rhetoric and not by dialectic. If anything, our contemporary educational system is designed to form persons to be incapable of dialectic and susceptible to rhetoric. And so the current state of affairs is unsurprising.

It's strange to think that rhetoric used to be a standard secondary level subject in the West. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where virtually every moderately educated adult were well versed in persuasion tricks.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/

Are we sure that most, or even many adults are well-versed in things they were taught in school? My experience suggests otherwise. I would honestly struggle with trigonometry or biology today, both subjects I excelled at in school. Funny enough, in my facebook feed today there are numerous people failing to answer "50+50-25*0+2+2" correctly.

Its less a "Marketplace of Ideas" and more a "church or private establishment" on the network. Even HN isnt spot on sometime bad ideas do rise up when they it appeals to peoples emotions more than sensibilities.

Social media (and the internet as a whole) are shaped by and promote the values of those who create it. They allow certain interactions and not others. (to what extent are the creators the leaders of the social media companies, vs. the users?)

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...

> We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top.

It's the same with the economy. Not the best products win, but the ones with the biggest advertising budget.

We should try to dampen the effect of these counterproductive forces.

Glad to see your very good idea rise to the top.

And this is mostly because HN, partly though the excellent work of dang, does, well.... kinda the same thing. HN is censored. And I approve.... that's why I'm here rather than somewhere like 4chan.

Ha, perhaps the success of the comment disproves its content!

Missing from this discussion is the understanding that speech is an inalienable right.

It does not need to be justified on consequentialist grounds, nor on the basis of the more pernicious metric of harm reduction.

Pointing a gun at someone to silence her is a form of censorship, and so is quietly erasing her from the most prevalent communications channels (deplatforming).

Figure out a way to achieve harm reduction without grotesque violations of natural rights. Until then, there will always be people who prefer dangerous speech to the safety of slavery.

The internet has been a beautiful experiment to find out how what crank ideology aligns best to the human default instinctive nature.

It's not good to both observe that crank ideas rise to the top due to the profit motive, and to think the solution could be that the people who are best at profit should get to censor speech.

Maybe we attack should sleazy commerce rather than speech?

The reason people go in for crank ideas is because they recognize that the people who sell them things are constantly manipulating them. They work so they don't have time to investigate everything themselves, so as a proxy many tend to believe marginal people who they don't know at all due to the signal that their speech is being suppressed by known liars who are never called out because of their power.

Meanwhile, the upper middle-class people who provide the infrastructure and strategy for the biggest frauds are smug in the belief that their betters are being honest about what is true and false, because their income depends on it.

The problem with people is that they are unmoored, with absolutely no sources of information that are not trying to squeeze cash out of them. They come up with sketchy heuristics to give them some semblance of stability between shifts at work and climbing pointless complications in their lives created by rent-seekers.

The problem with the comfortable upper middle-class is that they are too moored, too sure they're at the end of history. Too sure that they know what is true between stitching together half-remembered NYT and WaPo headlines with their discussions with each other at restaurants and dinner parties. Too sure that truth can and should be dictated by people who have a better degree than they do. As if maintaining that comfort is not an interest, as if bias towards themselves as "the middle" is actually the definition of being unbiased.

It's about the time constants of communication that cause this. Given time, the truth wins out. But when you accelerate communication beyond human capacitor to process it, you get what we have today.

> Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out.

These are just subjective judgements. All you're saying is that people you don't share the same value judgements with won out.

How do you explain the massive list of advancements humanity made during the Enlightenment period with this attitude? Seems like you're advocating another dark age.

> I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created.

The fact that you phrase your characterization of incorrect ideas like this suggests with pretty high certainty that you don’t exactly have a great birds’-eye view of the epistemic landscape yourself. People who characterize the “opposition” this way mostly get their ideas from NPR-tier Pravda publications, and aren’t exactly better suited for picking out “better models of truth and reality”.

I don’t characterise “the opposition” this way. I characterise some of the more prominent ‘fringe’ stuff as this.

I don’t really have an ‘us’ for there to be a singular ‘them’ I’m talking about, I’m not American and I don’t identify with any particular political party.

The fact that you equivocate NPR and Pravda means you’ve huffed plenty of those fumes yourself.

> Voting Republican is to enact fascism and tear down the tenants of democracy in the US

You seem like a skilled political analyst, so I defer to your expertise. One correction - it’s spelled “tenets”.

like every marketplace, what matters is the entrenched interests in the market place and the amount of space needed for a new market.

when the "too big to fail" market is filled with entrenched interests and bloat themselves to take up most real estate, then ideas only compete if the existing ideas accomodate them.

this is where we derive the "Uber for X" marketting speak. as such, the market

I think you could make a basic content richness argument. There are interesting nuanced left, right, libertarian, socialist, etc. ideas but none of these are the ones discussed. The stuff that gets popular is meme level trash. Social media selects for punchy sound bites as much or more than the old media it is replacing.

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” -- John Stuart Mill couldn't disagree more.

You're using the quote of someone who lived and died before the invention of the telephone, and also ignoring that he also advocated for a 'harm principle' (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle) which states "...that for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection."

So you think we should completely ignore anyone who has said anything of substance before any arbitrary technology was invented or if they have any other opinion that you disagree with? We can safely cast theses people's opinions out as invalid? Is that not exactly what you are implying? Do you not see how absurd those implicit arguments are?

That's not to mention the fact that you are ignoring the amount of influence that man had on our political and economic systems which benefit your life in ways you probably haven't considered...

It is this attitude which appears to be based on an idealistic assumption that people care about exchanging error for truth.

This is what I am arguing is not really the case, as demonstrated amply by the world around us.

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