Comment by lijogdfljk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lijogdfljk | Hacker News Reader

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> Emotions are real, but is it not the public responsibility to manage your emotions. Each person, solely, is responsible for their own emotions. If "emotional harm" becomes the basis for what speech is allowed and what is not then we cease to have a culture of free expression

Yea, this is bunk. What do you think fuels things like mass hysteria? What do you think fuels illogical decisions made in mass?

I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but lets not pretend humans are either logical or capable of handling their own emotions. They're terrible at it. Look at any collection of humans. You can't walk forward without stubbing your toe over examples. Daily commute traffic is full of humans who can't manage their own emotions. edit: Even police know that human memory can't be trusted. What do you think fuels decisions we make, if our memory is so mutable?

Likewise, if it was just emotions up for discussion that would be one thing. But it's not, it's so much more. It's "facts". A mass information war is taking place. Standing on the sidelines saying again, people can handle it, has already been proven false. Repeatedly. People cannot nor will not handle it, at least without help.

The more quickly we recognize how horrible humans are at handling emotions and information ingestion the better we can make reasonable decisions about how to aid humans in actually making progress.

>>I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but

then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation

Nor do I trust government agencies (like the CDC or the WHO) to be the "source of truth"

> then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation

I did not, you misunderstand.

I merely advocate for acknowledging that humans are terrible at the things i pointed at. Which conversely, you seem to advocate that we are capable there. You can both identify that we are terrible at information and not advocate for surveillance/censorship. Why do you jump to those contrasts?

To think of it differently, we have to acknowledge we have a problem before we can fix it. Information is a gun, and we have not taken gun safety. We need tools and acknowledgement of our limitations before we can wield the power you so haphazardly throw around. I do not trust young children with guns. We are nothing more than children in our current state.

My previous post advocated that we don't pretend the children can handle guns safely without training and safety tooling. edit: That we should find ways to prove gun safety training / tooling, rather than remove guns (in this analogy lol)

>>To think of it differently, we have to acknowledge we have a problem before we can fix it.

That is the thing, outside of mass censorship it is unsolvable problem

You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression

There is no utopia to be found here

> That is the thing, outside of mass censorship it is unsolvable problem

Completely agree there. edit: Or rather, that it's an unsolved problem. I misread `able` for `ed`

> You either allow people to speak freely, in which case misinformation will spread, and emotions will be harmed. or you restrict speech eliminating the very concept of free expression > There is no utopia to be found here

Yes, those are the current available options. I'm not questioning that.

I'm challenging your assertion that we're capable. More specifically, saying we must acknowledge that we're not capable. We must acknowledge and identify the problem.

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