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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

This is an amazing rationalization that doesn’t seem to answer the question of why private companies are being unethical if they exercise their freedom to choose what they publish. Nor have you established that choice in the private commercial publishing industry amounts to “silencing”. There is a reason that freedom of speech laws in the US do not apply to commercial speech.

> The deaths are just abstract deaths.

False. At least 5.7 million actual people have died from Covid. Probably many more. Your counter is abstract and somewhat straw man, while the pandemic is a fairly specific and real public health crisis that more or less all public health experts agree requires active management.

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You’ve misunderstood and somehow taken me to be saying the inverse of what I actually wrote, so thoroughly that it is difficult to see how you could be making a good faith criticism, though it is always possible that I just wrote my post very poorly. What I said was that the deaths caused by speech suppression are abstract while the deaths caused by speech acts can be very clear and obvious. Because the harms of speech suppression are hard to see, it is harder to argue against speech suppression. In this case the speech acts related to vaccine denialism can be clearly argued to have resulted in deaths, while it is harder to argue for the danger of deaths and other harms caused indirectly by speech suppression.

Though now that I think on it, there was suppression of anti-Iraq-war speech in the early 2000s. Maybe if those perspectives had been more widely heard, that war wouldn’t have happened.

In any case, what you do in your last paragraph is merely an example of the thing I’m talking about. Misunderstanding someone’s argument and calling that misunderstanding a strawman is itself a strawman. 5.7 million deaths on one side of the ledger, okay. Well, the establishment was wrong about masking early in the pandemic, so how many more lives would have been lost if pro-masking voices had been suppressed then?

If I misunderstood, can you elaborate on “it is a fallacy to say: Joe Rogan’s vaccine skepticism is getting people killed, therefore he should be silenced. The reason is that living in the sort of society that would silence Joe Rogan also gets people killed.“?

You seemed to defend and frame Rogan’s speech as if it was part of a beneficial citizenry probing corrupt government officials, and it seems like you downplayed the potential harm of spreading vaccine misinformation as being balanced out by the abstract harm of censorship.

I think that discussing both sides of a cost-benefit calculation will always sound like “downplaying” one side if you happen to think that one side of the calculation is obviously and straightforwardly the weightier. The way a utilitarian would approach this (not my preferred framing but not a bad one here) would be to say “how many deaths did vaccine misinformation cause, in expectation, probabilistically?” which is very hard to estimate, and then “how many deaths would result from the elimination of Enlightenment free speech norms qua norms?” which is even more impossible to even estimate. If we have a nuclear war because anti-war speech is suppressed (again: a thing that has happened historically) and three billion people die then “obviously” speech suppression was more harmful than vaccine misinformation. But this is the kind of thing that will only be obvious when it is too late.

To put it succinctly, you think I’m minimizing the harm of vaccine misinformation, and I suspect you’re minimizing the probable harms of normalizing speech suppression, and maybe we’re both somewhat right about the other.

It sounds like I didn’t misunderstand your top comment after all.

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