Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

The way some people talk these days you'd think that freedom is the freedom to disable the fire alarm and lock the doors in a burning theater. (e.g. climate change and COVID-19 denialism)

"Free speech" is so 1980s. Today it is all about protecting communication channels from spam, disinformation, revenge porn and other forms of coordinated disingenuous communications.

View on HN

I understand how coordinated disingenuous information is dangerous to society. But censorship of things like hateful speech (short of calls to violence which are illegal for good reason) or political misinformation has historically been abused. Even when we put that power in the hands of a transparent democratic or crowd-sourced non-governmental body we see minority views quashed by associating them with more obviously bad actors. Peer review has shown in the past the problems with letting group think suppress papers we found decades later to be accurate. I think we should use lower barriers to entry and try to create as many information outlets as possible while also using policy to make the economic or political interests behind those information sources more apparent both through financing laws and identification requirements. Free speech is one thing, anonymous free speech is another. Apart from policy, I think we should be more forgiving to those who feel differently on issues, even when we find them very important. I have some racist neighbors, and some that are prejudiced against people of certain (or all) faiths. I still talk with them all, laugh and share a beer with them, and openly disagree with them. I'm not going to try to get them fired, I'm trying to persuade them. And sometimes it works, a little. Technologically I think we have the tools to make following money trails feasible by the public, especially with a few policy changes regarding anonymity, though the scotus has made that much more difficult. If we reject anonymous donations from everyone, that would affect corporations too right? Simce they are people?

arxiv.org and the replication crisis prove peer review is a joke.

It makes my blood boil that when they do a meta analysis in clinical medicine they regularly reject 70% or more of the studies due to fundamental problems such as no control group (that study that failed to find vitamin C in the blood of COVID-19 patients but didn't test anybody else) or insufficient sample sizes.

Studies like that shouldn't be accepted for publication, in fact they shouldn't even get funded.

As long as the so-called “left” is against ideals of individual freedom, the so-called “left” is a complete joke.

Freedom of speech for working people, who have always been subject to the whims of the authoritarian workplace, has never been realized in the United States. Still, abandoning it as an ideal altogether, and nonsensically insisting its passé while inciting a war on “disinformation” in the same breath is utterly terrifying.

We didn't start the war against spam, disinformation, revenge porn, etc.

I don’t understand. Who is “we”?

Victims of spam, disinformation, revenge porn.

The silent majority of decent people who don't participate online or participate less because they are driven away by this BS.

Since the “right” is too, we’re just screwed all around.

Whilst these are undoubted challenges, I also think that there are more traditional challenges to freedom of speech. As majorities within societies have accepted liberal ideas, liberals have become increasingly censorious, threatening the freedom of speech of conservatives.

I'll grant that there is a small army of blog posters who write a blog post every day alleging this. It might even have a kernel of truth.

In that same day my spam filters caught 80 junk emails and I deleted another 20. If you own a cell phone you probably received multiple robocalls and junk texts in that time frame.

The fossil fuel industry has mounted a coordinated attack against our communication infrastructure and intellectual apparatus since the 1980s. to stop or delay a response to human-initiated climate change. If it leads to human extinction this will dwarf every other crime in human history.

So in a time when thousands of blog posts complaining about "cancel culture" get written every day I don't want to hear about it.

Majorities have become so tired of disingenuous and untruthful nonsense and rabble-rousing.

Tired is the right adjective. That stuff wears people out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com