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Comment by pengstrom | Hacker News Reader

How is speech not a behavior?

Self-censoring is crudely how civilisation works. We accept some restraints on our biological urges for the safety and order collective society provides.

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Speech is a behavior, it could be unpleasant, it could hurt, and it is also dangerous.

The reason free speech being cherished is because limiting it brings upon cons much out weight the pros. In particular you block the escape hatch of a death spiral. I'm not super familiar with history but even I remember it's repeated many times in many places, just that this time it's global.

> Self-censoring is crudely how civilisation works. We accept some restraints on our biological urges for the safety and order collective society provides.

Are you saying our civilization is no longer working?

You could say everything we do is behavior, but it's still useful to make a distinction between one thing and another. Maybe you'd like a different term, but I really think everybody understands what is meant by distinguishing word from action, or message from tone, etc. We're not talking zoology here.

That's not what I said. I said it's the content of the speech that is the distinction, not the behaviour around how it is presented.

People are self-censoring because of the fear of an out of proportion response to their speech's content, which is rife currently.

I was going to question whether you agreed in "free speech" because our U.S. counterparts are always up in arms about that, but then I see you're from Stockholm so no worries!

The saying goes 'Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.'

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